
Book ' c T 



CQPXRICHT DEPOSm 



THE ROGUE'S MARCH 



THE 

ROGUE'S MARCH 



Shams and Verities in History and 

Biography: Or, Do You Know 

a Great Man When You See Him, 

and If so. By What Signs? 



BY 

JOHN HUBERT GREUSEL 



Wast thou fain, poor father, 

To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn 

In short and musty straw? 




New York 

FIFTH AVENUE PUBLISHING CO. 

Publishers 



.5" 



Copyright, 1916, by 
John Hubert Greusel 




OCT -91916 



The Rogue's Mard©^, ^ 4 3 g g ^, ^ 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

L Millstones and the Grain .... i 

II. The I^>Iummy's Eloquent Silence . 12 

III. Study the Secret History .... 15 

IV. Fagots of Joan Still Blaze ... 21 
V. Coronations and Crucifixions . . 27 

VI. What Is This Thing Called 

"Great"? 34 

VII. Life's Amazing Irony 41 

VIII. The Wreath of Cypress 45 

IX. History Teaches Man Nothing . . 47 

X. The Human Kaleidoscope .... 60 

XI. All Men at Heart Tyrants ... 74 

XII. The Profound Fallacy 78 

XIII. All Life a Battle 88 

XIV. Why War Persists 94 

XV. Vv'iiAT O'clock with the World? . 99 

XVI. Blood Will Tell 107 

XVII. The Celestial Biograph . . . . iii 

XVIII. What Then Is "History"? .... 114 

XIX. The Rogue's March 118 



THE ROGUE'S MARCH 



THE MILLSTONES AND THE GRAIN : A WORD 
WITH THE READER 

Wast thou fain, poor father, 

To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn 

In short and miisty strazvf 

If What is this book, "The Rogue's March," about? We 
can tell you in a few words. 

Nay, make no grievous error: what we have heretofore 
lived by, we can live by no longer, historically speaking. 
If We built for ourselves a beautiful Garden of Lies and 
called it our Garden of Eden. And we read and believed 
our pig-trough history, wherein we were representing 
ourselves as an angel with a revolver in our hand ; and 
we learned to look on it as something good, to go by, and 

to live by 

jf Men talk of writing history or biography as tho this 
were some profound record attainable only thru year- 
long researches by students all but going blind in dust- 
laden National archives. 

But the simple Old Testament borrows a tremendous ad- 
vantage over all the books man writes and calls histories ; 

J 



2 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

for the Old Testament is the only history in which man iS 
called, to his face, hypocrite, thief and liar. 
Man, reading these plain words, marvels at them, and 
not wishing to make a confession against himself, replies 
that such extraordinary utterances "must" be inspired, 
the judgment of a superman, yea of God. 
^ For man, in all the mountains of history in which he 
has told his own tale, has never been frank enough to 
look at himself as he is. 

Always in the crises of his affairs does he need a sacrifice 
to let him, personally, go free, the verdict being "Not 
Guilty !" 

Therefore, when suddenly confronted with himself, some- 
what as he is, in all his moral nakedness as revealed 
by the Great War of 1914, he deplores that he has been 
driven out of his Garden of Eden. 
Which is only another way of saying his Garden of Lies. 

§ § § 

If At this solemn moment, stript of his last rags of his- 
torical self-praise, before his eyes the spectacle of some 
five millions of his brothers around him in death-agonies, 
this peculiar animal otherwise known as man is now 
standing naked before his fellow-kind in acknowledged 
self-distrust of all the old lies by which once he was 
wont to fool himself. 

^ It cannot longer be concealed that the eye of the eagle 
sees more than the eye of the groveling toad. 
Is he not now tired of being a toad and seeks to be an 
eagle ? 

Eeenie, meenie, minee, mo. Tis all very human. And 
this is our story: The toad that would be an eagle, the 
eagle that grovels again till it has its wish and becomes 
a toad. 



WAS HUXLEY DREAMING? 3 

^ The foregoing, too, should be the basis of the new and 
honest type of history or biography that will take its rise 
from the close of the Great War of 1914. 
In plain words, in the past we have too long been writing 
history in a way that, in effect, has been a sort of glori- 
fied Rogue's March, wherein man has deliberately pre- 
sented himself as a poseur. 

In the hope of helping end this dastardly form of his- 
torical and biographical quackery, we rudely sketch 
herein what to our mind comprise some of the simple, 
age-old and highly interesting human facts that hereto- 
fore have been ignored in writing history or biography, 
and should henceforth have large place as underlying 
principles, in work along these lines. 
K In the old-line average light and pleasant work of fiction 
known as history or biography, world-old dramas re- 
staged from generation to generation have been brought 
forward as indications of rising power of good in men's 
ways : but the wolf's heart is still there, as in the dawn 
of time. 

^ Over and over again, generation after generation, it is 
the story of the millstones and the grain. 

§ § § 

^ Here, for example, is what a very wise man says of 
men's ways : "The practice of that which is ethically best 
involves a course of conduct in all respects opposed to 
'success' in the cosmic struggle for existence. In the 
place of ruthless self-assertion, it demands self-restraint ; 
in place of thrusting aside or treading down all com- 
petitors, it requires not merely that the individual shall 
respect but shall help his fellows ; its influence is directed 
not so much to the survival of the fittest as to the fitting 
of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the 
gladiatorial theory of existence." 



4 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

j[ These plain words are found on page 82, Huxley's 
"Evolution." The question now arises, in what sense are 
these ideas to be understood — as a reality or as a dream 
of social democracy? 

Is it all merely a fantastic mind-picture but little removed 
from sleep-walking, wherein the impressions on your 
brain blend more with the illusion than with the realism 
of life as found; or, we repeat, is it something really 
bulwarked on life, as actually lived by human beings in 
this little world we see around us, day by day ? 

§ § § 
1[ There are those that hold that, with minor and negli- 
gible modifications, the great moral principles upon which 
our social fabric rests remain always practically the 
same. These are the brotherhood-people, to be sure. 
Men who reason thus profess merely to be interested and 
not specially disturbed when surveying human nature in 
action : regarding the passions of mankind with an indul- 
gent eye; therefore easily disposing of our moral lapses 
as negligible incidentals in no wise affecting permanently 
the great moral principles so termed on which our social 
fabric is said to be buttressed. 

^ But is not this separation, strictly for purposes of his- 
tory and biography, parallel in essence to the illogical tho 
lawyer-like contention of Portia: that there is in truth 
and in fact, gentlemen of the jury, a widely marked 
distinction between the flesh and the blood? Why not 
flesh without blood and blood without flesh? Exactly. 
Why not men's ways without the man, or man without 
his ways? 

Is it true because Portia said it with lady-like grace — 
was it ever true — and is it true to-day because for his 
own peculiar lawyer-like ends the National history- 
monger utilizes the conception of an imaginary line of 



BATTLES, PESTILENCE, MARTYRS 5 

demarcation as between the man and his ways, in order 
to support, let us say, things as they are not ? 
Has your own private conduct to do with pohtical 
changes, restorations, revolutions, or has your life, like 
that of the race, speaking as a whole, been worked out 
largely thru causes that are not subject to politico-legal 
classification, in dusty pigeon-holes of National archives ? 
Use your common sense. 

§ § § 

If Rude as it may appear that we should even hint at it, 
but are you prepared to show that on the whole your 
individual life shows less failings than marked the lives 
of the fathers, likewise that your complaints, passions and 
wishes are more detached from your own heart? This 
being true or false, as you like it, at any rate, to quote 
the gifted pen of Francis Hackett, "what objection can 
you have against permitting the young to know the im- 
mense deceptions of the whole elaborate (social) contri- 
vance . . . and to show that under the starched bosom 
of the world there is a heart very different from the 
heart that the bosom advertises. We know it, but the 
man who speaks it is a traitor to the principalities of 
starch." 

§ § §. 
If In this book we have to do with plain and obvious 
facts, not as "facts," but as confessions of definite phases 
of human nature that, if they do not mark our progress 
at least define our limitations as human beings, in the 
present state of our onward march. 
We shall have much to say of battles, pestilence, martyrs, 
prisoners, meanness and blindness, the shame of things, 
their smallness, and on the whole the prodigious waste 
of life, as found. 
Sticking these things under your nose, without further 



6 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

flatteries and stript of the deprecations of professional 
history-mongers, at least we are in a position no longer 
to deceive ourselves as to "what" we represent. 
Tf Whether as Mr. Hackett sets up the endeavor to put 
more "truth" into history or biography in the end merely 
proclaims the critic's errancy of judgment, and makes 
obvious the critic's individual sentimentalities, softnesses 
or hardnesses, and all that, does not necessarily disbar 
thinking men from conjuring up if not a better then at 
least a more honest social contrivance than that hereto- 
fore recorded in books : but that the old-line book-record 
is anywhere near the authentic life-record can no longer 
be supported in this solemn hour — and we will tell you 
why. Scribblers of all nations, like their soldier-brothers, 
are hiding behind hastily dug trenches and are in mortal 
terror of the frightful mines exploding unexpectedly 
round about. 

Of a sudden the whole affair tumbling around our ears, 
we are much in the position of Nydia, the blind girl at 
Pompeii, endeavoring to flee a catastrophe invisible to her 
dead eyes yet tremendously real to the mind that shrinks 
back upon itself, in terror. 

^The plain fact is that the average man is always con- 
cerned in realizing himself in his own way, as against 
even the conventional flatteries of history in supporting 
the social contract : hence it is inevitable now and then 
that beneath the placid surface of our well-ordered social 
theatricals explosions are constantly taking place. These 
eruptions are often volcanic in violence: till the wonder 
is that Society itself does not blow up. 

§ § § 

^ In this Republic of ours we do solemnly protest in our 
official scribblings that we are devoted to diverse forms 
of idealism, among others these : 



LAUNCHING THE CURSE 7 

Our statesmen proclaim that they live to do good to all 
mankind, whereas for the spoils of commerce see no 
inconsistency in supplying hundreds of millions' worth 
of deadly weapons to European combatants already 
locked in death-agonies ; yet in the next breath protest 
that our peculiar conduct is to be charged to high ideals 
for "humanity." 

Our religious sects launch the curse against one another 
and despite their endless piffle about brotherhood, are 
widely separated by such things as church architecture, 
likewise openly exhibiting the strangest anomoly between 
the lives of members and their affirmations of brother- 
hood. 

In short, the present writer has never been able to know 
whether or not a man was a Christian except by asking 
him, "Are you a Christian ?" not being able to tell other- 
wise, just as you ask, "Are you a Democrat, or are you 
a Republican ?" 

And as for political parties, it is of course conceded that 
the beginning and the end is to cry out in the market- 
place that the victory is for the people, even as the yellow 
editor asks for support because of idealism and not for 
dirty dollars. Finally, the leaders of the masses may 
always be relied on to insist that their sole aim is for the 
common good. 

If Each element has thus its day of power only to misuse 
that power when riding in on the necks of the prostrate : 
and as ever even the lowest prostitute always makes a 
show of sham fight for her virtue, not caring to yield too 
readily when wishing to impress a new lover, likewise 
old-line history and biography mongers are always to be 
depended on to play well their dirty part, maintaining at 
all hazards spurious outward protestations of the brother- 
hood-cult regardless of the wolf's heart within. 



8 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

Tf O, the waste of it, and the curse of it ; the precious 
time lost in idle and monstrous flatteries; stereotyping 
and repeating in this Age of Machinery lie on lie to 
bolster and sustain a rotten situation: keeping men in 
bondage because concealing reality and making men satis- 
fied thru a smug complaisancy largely composed of 
moral wind and gas. 

1[ Therefore, let us in "The Rogue's March" have done 
with great men for awhile, and return to men not great, 
the little ways of men, that is to say, men as they are: 
then, if we are not satisfied we will at least no longer 
deceive ourselves. 

§ § § 

U In this connection it is a pleasure for the present writer, 
in passing, to lift his hat to an old pal, one who passed 
twenty years in the U. S. Press Gallery, Franklin H. 
Hosford. 

^ "Greatness to my mind," says Hosford, "is either a fact 
or a fiction : excellent men are numerous, good men are 
of course frequent, but great men seldom come along, 
and when they are great they are, according to my obser- 
vation, not always good. 

^ "Many a vain pretender I have seen glorified in the 
press, many a modest man of great merit utterly escaping 
mention. 

^ "Why is this ? And as for Vv^hat is called the 'truth' of 
history, we know that History is notoriously untruthful, 
when read outside volumes of Divine inspiration." 

§ § § 
^ However, there is no need to despair. Real history, if 
written under a method that will not begin by excluding 
man from the picture, will be found to have for its basis 
very simple human elements: comprising such known 
facts as lust, gluttony, vanity, with now and then a 



HISTORY'S TRUE EPITOME 9 

glimpse of milder qualities that link man's life to another 
world. 

If you have any curiosity in this matter it can be satis- 
fied for ten cents. The complete classification will cost 
you only one dime, and you will find the list condensed 
on less than half a page of type in a slim green booklet, 
read by children of the Roman Catholic church. 
In this tiny brochure, you can acquaint yourself with the 
foundations of all history worthy of the name — as out- 
lined briefly in a literal statement covering the survey of 
the human passions. 

^ We refer of course to the booklet called the Catechism : 
and confine our remarks to the summary of the passions, 
not to other parts dealing with dogma. 
We tell you this plainly, that you may educate yourself 
to respect truth wherever found : for if ever there was a 
classification of man's ways that has stood and will stand 
the test of time, that summary is along the line of the 
eternal passions, as set forth simply, for the child's mind. 
Numbering these passions may be simple enough, but the 
application is of course often extremely subtle and baf- 
fling; but whether or not you are successful in your 
efiforts to trace the connection, depend upon it the method 
is correct. 

Man and his little ways in round terms of his passions — 
here all history begins and ends. 

We say this stript of all by-play, and wholly in the de- 
tached attitude of the judge, summing up the evidence 
and pointing out the law. 



II Hereafter, when you read history or biography, suppose 
you sit down and square its validity with an accredited 
list of the human passions? You will then be in a 



10 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

position to clear your mind of hypocrisy and flatteries, 
and will know whether or not you have looked on the 
picture of a human being, or on some imaginary person 
or nation. 

Not as a churchman but as a man of the world we have 
drawn on the little list in the child's book, as we pass 
along. In each instance cited in "The Rogue's March" 
he who runs may read. 

§ § § 

If Always remember, in all history worth while, the feeble 
human spirit must have something to take hold of, and 
to feel. This something is, necessarily, what heretofore 
historians and biographers seemed banded to suppress — 
the plain record of human passions, as fundamental facts, 
comprising thus the real tho overlooked and ignored basis 
of all human records whatsoever. 

§ § § 

^ One last word : It seems strange, does it not, that men 
should go to so much pains to teach the child a working 
list of the human passions, only to have the man, him- 
self, pay no attention to the information in writing about 
Hfe? 

This assertion of ours at first blush sounds too broad: 
but for justification if not for literal reply we refer you, 
herewith, to the picture of Civilization contained in this 
'The Rogue's March." 

^ The first great primeval element in human history is 
hunger : whose iron law reaches all the way from feeding 
your belly to feeding your mind : and quite naturally 
after your belly has been satisfied vanity creeps in to 
play any one of a thousand related roles, largely hidden 
from the prying eye, to be sure, but vanity just the same. 
We therefore begin "The Rogue's March" with the 



ELEMENTAL STUFF ii 

amiable weakness known as vanity, human elemental stuff 
that despite all apologists and sleep-walkers of history 
and biography, still survives, just as it always has: and 
we now direct your attention to a somewhat startling but 
very human instance, withal. 



II 

THE MUMMY'S ELOQUENT SILENCE 

If This know ye at once: the ironical meaning 
behind the Mummy's golden rings set zvith tur- 
quoise, makes clear that the human heart does 
not change, the centuries run their course to 
oblivion. 

^ In the Egyptian Room of the Metropolitan Museum the 
visitor sees, among other surprising exhibits, the Mummy 
of a famous Queen that hved and loved in a dynasty 
all-powerful three thousand years before the birth of 
Christ. 

Blackened by the flight of centuries, the Mummy still 
retains a pathetic realism that fascinates while it repels. 
|[ Her gruesome hands peacefully folded across her bosom 
are indeed shriveled to a husk, yet in an astonishing de- 
gree make human appeal. 

At first glance, these hands resemble the claws of a wild 
beast more than hands of a human being: yet on closer 
inspection excite our surprise, reminding us of some 
quaint motif in black marble, wherein with infinite care 
the sculptor has indicated the fine grain of the skin, even 
to the tiny cups of the hairs. 

With hideous realism fossilized knuckle-bones, as white 
as chalk, peep through the black curled flesh, contrasted 
with which we behold golden rings set with blue-green 

12 



TIME'S OLDEST TALE 13 

turquoise looped loosely around fingers once plump and 
tapering but now shriveled like the claws of a huge bat. 
If Recovering from our momentary stupefication at this 
unusual sight — Vanity triumphant over Death! — we de- 
rive instruction in men's little ways by studying here 
a classical example of the vicissitudes of human existence, 
its progress, pride, power, failure, agony, and its death; 
and discover thus before us some of the strange principles 
that regulate as well as dominate the little lives of men. 

§ § § 

If In preparing her body for the rock-tomb, the Mummy's 
finger-nails were stained with warm pigments, her hair 
exquisitely dressed; her gentle form, now, alas, all too 
soon to lose its grace and loveliness, was swathed in 
precious cloths exhaling the odors of the mystic amaranth, 
that flower of immortality; while, too, still other toilet 
secrets lent their aid that the Queen might always remain 
beautiful in her long last sleep. 

If On the lid of her coffin, renowned artists of that remote 
era, had carved quaint picture-writings or hieroglyphs, 
recording the fascinating story of the proud beauty's life ; 
each tiny character was enameled with a finishing polish 
of plumbago ; and even to-day after the flight of centuries 
the precious gloss still remains undimmed. 
These writings have indeed the exquisite detail of fine 
black lace — appealing, mysterious — loving last tribute of 
brown hands now long since mouldered into dust. 
If Last of all, they clasped on the Queen's necklace, also 
her golden beads of Ophir, and looped in her ears her 
golden rings; and then near the Mummy's casket in 
the rock-bound tomb, ladies in waiting placed the Queen's 
rouge-pots, pastes, powders, and perfumes; — all deemed 
indispensible the moment the Queen awoke. For her first 
impulse naturally would be to see herself in the mirron 



14 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

^ Finally, about the casket were assembled many dolls 
that would in future ages, at the right time spring into 
life as the Queen's servants. Such was the pious belief 
of that remote hour, in the twilight of history. 
jf Thus loving friends in those last sad hours left nothing 
undone that the body according to their generous hope, 
might continue beautiful indefinitely— though shriveled 
to a shell. 

§ § § 
If We have herein reverently lifted the veil's edge over 
thirty centuries of time — just for an instant! — and we 
discover that the human heart is to-day as it was from 
the beginning. 
How very human it all is. 

We respect the thought behind the Mummy's turquoise 
and gold ornaments, her perfumes, dolls, rouges, paste- 
pots and her mirror ; but is there not a satire, somewhere, 
when we think of man and his little ways? 
^ With slight changes of background and era could it 
all not have happened yesterday? Is it not, in short, 
actually of our own time ? 

For in spite of all our high brag about the progress shown 
by our boasted Civilization, that is to say our air-ships, 
motor-cars, our uses of electricity, and all our other utili- 
ties, this Mummy if suddenly awakened from her sleep 
of centuries would have very much to learn. 
But as to the vanities, the human heart is as it always 
was : she would find nothing new to learn, there. 
11 Still is the story told in these words : fighting, loving, 
praying. 



HI 

STUDY THE SECRET HISTORY 

^ The eternal passions begin and end the study 
of men's ways: forming thus the real interpreta- 
tion, from Eden down. 

^ The historian divides his narrative into periods Ancient 
and Modern, their various ramifications laid down in an 
orderly manner ; the astronomer marks his Spring, Sum- 
mer, Autumn and Winter; and the great Shakespeare 
records man's life in Seven Ages. 

Yet no man has numbered the complications growing out 
of the eternal passions : tho few in number, the passions 
have expressions infinite beyond the knowing, therefore 
beyond comprehensive analysis. 

^ Poets, philosophers and sages, thruout ages have busied 
themselves in unending endeavors to set forth, with 
proper shadings, flattering accounts of man and his little 
ways : yet the world at this late date still awaits a Black- 
stone of History, an analyzer who will so number and 
order the eternal passions that henceforth conflicting in- 
terpretations of man and his ways may be cleared. 
Vain hope you say ? Who knows . . . ? 
^ Go out on a crowded corner and watch the crowds 
swarming by: as far as the story goes the scene spells 
chaos. 
But study men's ways with the veneer of Civilization 

15 



i6 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

stripped off, their shadings from grave to gay, from 
laughter to tears, and you necessarily conclude that all 
the episodes of this vain and turbulent life, as primeval 
as Eden, hark back to three sources, fighting, loving and 
praying. 

These three key-words will, too, form the basis of the 
new type of historical and biographical writing we pur- 
pose to tell you about, a history very strange and very 
new in this respect : Man will have a place in it, with all 
his little ways! 

^ One day, perhaps, a new Blackstone will provide the 
master-key to unlock all the tiny well-nigh invisible trap- 
doors of the human heart. 

And then we will have history written as it should be 
written — based on human nature in action. 
Man's ways will then be found to be as old as the dust 
under your feet : there is nothing new under the sun. 
From Job to Tolstoi nothing else is recorded other than 
the eternal passions, expressing virtuous or evil desire, 
as men use these strange words to tell something that is 
really very simple : we mean, human life. 
In various disguises obscure or easily penetrated we 
find our old friends pride, sloth, envy, covetousness, van- 
ity, lust, and the others; and now and again on rare 
occasions we run across passions that give wings to man's 
imagination, gathering around such mystic words as faith 
and soul, bridging for man the gulf, infinitely wide, that 
lies between this world and the stars. 

§ § § 

^ Whatever the new type of historical writing turns out 
to be, at least the answer is always the same — that you 
must know the heart, and that at best it is very old. 
Study the secret history of the heart : all else is so much 
mere preface in the Book of Life. 



DESTINY 17 

It is the perpetual play of the passions that gives to Hfe 
its perennial Spring. 

And hence, however old or worn the tale or dulled by- 
repetitions that resound in faint and fainter accents till 
lost in the misty Past, with its mysterious beginning of 
things, life is always new to those just coming up. 
For each generation, the earth must be rediscovered. It 
is the old story of the young man's first sweetheart — 
never such before. 

^We refer here to one episode, du Barry. Change the 
name to Smith or Jones, the land from France to Amer- 
ica, as you will, making ten thousand combinations of 
cities, names, dates, years, and social conditions. Still 
the main-spring of life is always the same. 
^ The gilded du Barry's time has all but run away ; and 
to-day she is in the cart, on the way to the guillotine. 
This proud beauty is now leveled to the mean estate of 
the common grisette. Betv/een the high lights and her 
downfall, in one form or in another form, du Barry's 
gayety is a symbol. Goethe used the idea in "Faust," 
Strindberg in his "Wanderings of Lucky-Per." 
It is true that du Barry is this-and-that, as they say, but 
the end would be not otherwise were she head-milliner, or 
veritable Joan of Arc ; the important point is that nothing 
is constant save change, nothing of beauty, glory or power 
but must perish. 

^ There comes the inevitable day when Madam la Com- 
tesse passes forever from the splendors of Versailles, 
into exile in a ruinous old building with bare walls and 
wooden seats. 

Yet in her time Madam la Comtesse had been veritable 
queen of France. Come to Paris in a cart, this village 
girl by the very audacity of her talent for politics and 
intrigue became King's mistress, and thus vastly exer- 



i8 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

cised her day of glory and power : how well, how ill, is 

not for us to recall at this solemn hour. Enough to 

know, a miserable woman's end has come! 

Of a sudden, smallpox lays Louis XV low; Madam's 

protector is gone ; and with it in that instant, du Barry's 

power. 

1[ Ah, how terribly she had fought to keep her place, but 

now in vain. 

For years she had put down her enemies; had risen to 

glory against a high tide of envy ; she had shown herself 

a consummate politician ; mistress of card-stacking. But 

she was destined to take one more ride in the cart. The 

cart was it seems to begin and to end her career. 

j[ As the executioner came forward, she pleaded for just 

one more moment of life, but he shook his head. 

jf Like a flash of silver the axe gleamed through the 

air. Her head rolled into the basket. 

]f Soon or late, the inevitable. Nothing is constant save 

change, nothing of beauty, glory or power, but must 

perish. 

§ § § 

^ Through centuries of tireless repetition — from peasant 
to king, from queen to daughter of the people — we have 
love, hate, jealousy, envy, greed — and on and on. 
We know by a thousand instances that men still commit 
murder for jealous love; that since the distant days of 
Troy, some newly-found fair Helen has been stolen from 
her surprised husband (she was willing to go), and 
finally that, long before the days of the Iliad men butch- 
ered for gold or lands. 

^ Across the track of centuries, from the time when 
man was cave-dweller, on down to the time he was 
sheep-herder, and on to the days when he first tilled land, 
following on down to the era of soldier-conqueror, and 



UNTO GOING DOWN OF SUN 19 

continuing down to the time he became trader — down 
till this very latest hour, when man is inventor — to this 
passing moment, man is as he is. 
Not only, is as he is, but is as he was. 
j[ We are talking here of the heart in an endeavor to 
make clear than any history worthy of the name is, after 
all, but a record of human nature, in action. 
If Thus we end as we begun — with the everlasting human- 
nature elements staring us in the face: this pride, this 
envy, this greed, this jealousy, this love of gold, this 
wolf's heart, with here and there the few softer qualities 
that men applaud because of very rarity. 
For you to know man as he is — should that ever be your 
vain and egotistical hope! — at least the way is as clear 
before you as the path to destruction, that broad boule- 
vard leading straight ahead. 

If The good sword gathers rust, the knight's bones, no 
man knows their last resting place, but by the measure 
of vanity all things human are still reckoned, unto the 
going down of the sun. 

Do not let us deceive ourselves. Self-deception is the 
one great evil. It makes real progress all the more diffi- 
cult. 

If The great tomb-builder. Time (as Byron calls Father 
Time), keeps up his century-old work, returning races 
and rulers to the common dust. 

For empires rise, flourish and decay, kings, cutthroats, 
sages, poets and mendicants live their brief hour and 
are forgotten ; the ancient abbey at last crumbles to ruin 
and under the broken arches the bat finds her lair and 
the homeless human wretch crawls to seek shelter from 
the storm. 

Infinitely-slow attritions of time year by year take an 
almost inperceptible toll of dust from the hard stones; 



20 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

frost cracks the rock, rain enters the crevices which at 
last become fissures down to the heart of the stone: 
and thus even seemingly everlasting granite bowlders 
dissolve and are known no more. Then the flying sands, 
after centuries of ceaseless and cunning labor spread the 
shroud: till the traveler of that distant day does not 
even pause a moment to study the spot as he passes 
over the ruins of the majestic temple, for all record of 
it has passed from this earth. 

§ § § 

jf And still is the human story told in these three words : 

fighting, loving, praying. 

Man will remain man, for ever, the mental attitudes of 

all historians to the contrary notwithstanding. 

The new type of biographer and historian, therefore, 

should occupy himself as far as possible in studying 

the secret story of the human heart. 

All else is so much mere detail in the Book of Life. 



IV 

FAGOTS OF JOAN STILL BLAZE 

If Behold now, rising in ghostly vision out of the 
dim Past, this Witch that become a Saifft: and 
reflect in your little brain, as before you on the 
screen appears the trembling and uncertain out- 
lines of her pathetic face, twisted by fire, whether 
after all we should write History by putting man 
in, or by leaving him out . . . ? 

jf But first get through your mind a fact that heretofore 
all History has been banded to suppress: the rawest 
truth about man is his judgment of his brother. Where 
he should whiten, he befouls, and where he should believe, 
he scoffs. 

We hear a frightful din, these days of millions of mur- 
ders. The bleat, blab and cackle is about man's "manifest 
destiny," as recorded by historians. But do we arrive 
at this conclusion by putting man in the history-thing, 
or by leaving him out? 

1[ Used from childhood to think of the "other man" 
largely from the way that man's conduct touches our 
personal comfort or profit, we find ourselves separated 
from our fellow-kind by such things as food, drink, 
houses, clothing, and churches. 

No; we are not talking about Europe, but about this 
Republic of ours, wherein we do daily offer up many 

21 



22 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

official utterances of righteousness, accompanied by pious 
protests of equality and brotherhood, sentiments to which 
we burn perpetual incense. 

j[ There has always been much difficulty in trying to 
look on mankind ''as a unit." Hence, it has been easier 
and at the same time more flattering to write what we 
call our history by leaving man out, instead of putting 
him where he belongs. . . . 

U Man was man long before he was politician, preacher 
or lawyer; and will remain man long after the race of 
politicians, preachers and law-givers has perished from 
this earth. 

Ideals of social justice as between Nations, supply abund- 
ant materials for July 4th or July 14th celebrations, but 
the enthusiasm dies before the cold grey dawn of the 
day after. 

Do we really, at heart, believe in the Brotherhood, over 
which we waste so much ink, preach so many sermons, 
and enact so many laws? 

We herald the theory from the housetops, shout it thru 
megaphones; in short, we will do everything except live 
it in our daily lives. 

§ § § 

j[ Even in those days men shook their heads solemnly, 

and thanked Heaven that they were not like Joan, the 

lean witch. 

Yes, she is a witch, of course she is : and good riddance 

to her. 

What, she saved France from the English . . . ? 

Why, man, that woman is a witch I tell you ; a vile witch, 

a she-devil; and you would better keep away or she'll 

burn you. 

^ They piled the fagots high and her life yielded to 

the sacrifice of fire : aye, a death as base and vile as ever 



TIME'S REVENGE 23 

Truth suffered in a world forever bringing Truth to 
the scaffold or to the stake. 

The gruesome spectacle hadn't even the merit of novelty : 
for witch-burning was not half as sensational as feeding 
Christians to the lions. Whatever Joan may have been, 
at least she was no "Christian." Don't you see, she was 
only a "nominal" Christian. 

It seems there's a stiff difference, somewhere; for in 
1914, the point was likewise raised as between real and 
nominal Christians, in the prodigious European struggle. 
We are quite sure in this Republic of ours, that no 
Christians were guilty of such acts as our historians 
in the past have usually suppressed. 
So, likewise in Joan's day. 

§ § § 

^ Years have a way of passing, one, ten, one hundred, and 

on and on, no matter what man does to his brother. 

And by and by, his brother's time comes, tho often enough 

so long-deferred that brother has fallen asleep on the 

brown bosom of Mother Nature: the poor heart no 

longer aches, the tears are dried forever, no sound can 

reach him more. 

All that remains is the empty echo of a name. 

Another generation now desires to go on record that, in 

other years a great wrong was done. 

][ And thus it eventually chanced for Joan : chanced in 

the inevitable leveling of Time: evil passions gone: men 

seeing more clearly because no longer blind to the fact 

that all flesh is of the Brotherhood. 

The grass has grown over her grave ever so long. Let 

us think : well, upwards of five hundred years ; but at last 

the clock struck the hour for her. 

|[At St. Peter's, April 18, 1909, before 45,000 French 

pilgrims, the beatification of Joan took place. 



24 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

To-day, I have been studying a celebrated French artist's 
spirited record of the impressive scene. 
Immense paintings over the ahar depict the French maid's 
heroic sacrifices; and Joan's hfe-sized effigy is there: all 
veiled, however, awaiting the dramatic moment in the 
Mass. 

^ The ceremony began by the reading of the Brief ; . . . 
and at the final word the veils floated away, seemingly 
vanishing in a miraculous sea of light . . . the immense 
altar star-gemmed with innumerable lights . . . and at 
the psychological moment Joan herself appeared there, 
so it seemed, against the background of celestial dia- 
monds. 

The bells pealed, the massed choirs entoned the 
TeDeum ... a whole city was at prayer. 
Overcome by religious ecstasies, the 45,000 French pil- 
grims, swept off their feet by the zeal for Joan's presence, 
of one accord burst into frantic cheers . . . which, how- 
ever, were immediately suppressed. 

§ § § 

jf Thus closed one more episode in the century-deferred 
drama summarizing the predestined progress of the Maid 
of Orleans toward ultimate canonization. 
We say predestined . . . and we mean exactly that. 
However, not predestined in any dogmatic or creedal 
sense, nor yet predestined thru the so-called ''mysterious 
outworkings" of Providence . . . but predestined thru 
the inevitable littleness of man, himself. 
If For the brand of Cain on man's brow is not there be- 
cause he killed his brother, but because often enough 500 
years or more must roll away before he is even aware that 
he has transgressed. In spite of man's late retrievals, of 
past wrongs, he goes on century after century dyeing his 
hands with the blood of one ideal after the other. This 



MAN, MYTH-MONGER 25 

marks in him a certain innate hypocrisy that up to the 
passing moment in world-Hfe, our philosophers and our 
historians, in their scribbHngs, have not dared to face. 
The doom of it, the curse of it, the satire of it is found 
in the unavaiUng substitution of words for deeds. 
If Thus, in the far-off years that no man is to know, and 
of which no man is to care, it is solemnly decreed that 
the wrong is now righted ; and the curious fact to be 
noted is that often centuries elapse before man is pre- 
pared to bow his brazen brow before the ruin he spread. 
A crust for Joan in life would far outweigh the golden 
crown man would, some centuries later, press down on 
the grinning skull. 

jf The world will yet see the Alsatian village maid, Jean 
le Purselle, who yielded her life to the sacrifice of fire, 
kindled by mad-men, become in turn Queen of the 
Church, or saint as they say. Also, from witch to saint 
in secular history-mongering. 

^ Did I say yielded her life, victim to fagots lit by bigots, 
or mere "nominal" Christians? 

What is called history, as written by the human animal, 
at all times reserves the right to misunderstand our 
brother, and to make restitution, nobody knows when, if 
ever. 

And on your smaller stage, you too, no doubt, may one 
day be idealized beyond the knowing, you and your little 
breed, little as you are. 

§ § § 

^ Well, what was she then ? Even as you or I : neither 
witch nor saint, but only a woman more sinned against 
than sinning; living and dying under extraordinary cir- 
cumstances . . . till at last she has indeed become a myth, 
as must necessarily be under the ingenious practices of 
man, the myth-monger. 



26 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

j[ It could not well be otherwise. However, the time comes 
when the frightful wrong, done her by the ordeal of fire, 
demands in itself, protest, even tho protest is no longer 
worth while. . . . The human animal may always be 
relied upon to assume excessively pious attitudes, fol- 
lowing deeds of blood. 

And finally, men fell to telling folk-lore about her — just 
as on your smaller stage you idealize beyond the knowing 
some of our Americans now dead and gone. 
^ Thus time and chance always have the last reckless 
roll of the Dice of Destiny, and where the cubes will 
tumble, or what deuces or aces they will turn up, no man 
knows to this hour. 

Joan's story affords a classical instance of man's cruelty 
and blindness; likewise of man's enormous egotism in 
thinking centuries later to right the Past by ceremonials, 
written, spoken or enacted. 

We repeat, the brand of Cain is found in this : that man 
murders and knows it not for hundreds of years. 
Then, he rolls up his eyes, sniffs a bit and solemnly pro- 
tests that all's well with our race because of the Man 
that died on the Cross : and die on the Cross He did, 
but at the time no human being seemed to know or care. 
And do we know or care, even to-day ? 
^ Hence, this amazing spectacle : Joan in time is no longer 
a she-devil. The human elements lose their native iden- 
tity entirely, in belated efforts of history-mongers to blot 
out the Past. 

For the Past not only fades like a dream, but the Past 
is indeed a strange dream : and men and women of times 
past, as reported hundreds of years later, in what man 
terms "history," are good or bad beyond all human beings 
now alive: till men become demons or demi-gods. 
m Whose story are we to believe ? 



V 

CORONATIONS AND CRUCIFIXIONS 

If Is this, then, the peculiar sign of fitness for im- 
mortal renown, as measured by mankind: that in 
the flesh you did walk this zvorld friendless and 
unknown, a Hero of Defeat: aye, that dogs 
harked at your rags taking you for a pauper, tho 
you were prince: and finally, that circumstances 
forced you to make a mock and a commodity of 
your art, in order to please the saloon-keepers 
of Holland , , . ? 

If Let us see more of this history-thing, as writ, whether 
indeed the practice has been to put man in, or to keep 
man out of the page ; and more especially whether the 
time is not ripe for man to tell the stark truth about him- 
self? 

\ Whole libraries have been lavished on the glories of 
Rembrandt, yet in his life-time there was scarcely the 
scratch of a pen in his behalf. 

Likewise, Nietzsche, likewise Lincoln . . . likewise Bal- 
zac, likewise Shakespeare . . . likewise Columbus . . , 
also, hundreds of others. 

Nor should we forget the case of Socrates and 
Christ. . . . 

If However, believe it or not, history-mongers have amply 
provided a commodity known as immortality, otherwise 
the irony of fame after death. 

27 



28 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

How well does this speak for history, or is this history- 
thing merely an after-thought, read into the record by 
men who knew neither the actors, the immediate scenes, 
nor the actual conditions? 

^ One of the peculiarities of historical and biographical 
writing: that the longer a man is dead, the more is 
"known" of him : altho in his years of flesh and blood he 
may have passed thru like a ghost. Recall in this con- 
nection the vast diligence on the topic "Shakespeare": 
for Shakespeare, even for biographical purposes, is no 
longer classed as a human being, but instead is regarded 
largely as "topic." . . . Whole libraries to prove, what- 
ever you wish to prove, forsooth. That's fair, isn't it? 
So runs this world away. 

1[Also, still another foundation-stone in historical and 
biographical method : things "too near" must be set aside 
for years, at least till all the actors in the drama are 
gone ; their mouths stopped by death, their ears and eyes 
rotted away, their hearts a lump of dust. 
Welcome then your historical hero : make of him what 
you will, without fear of contradiction. Who cares? 

§.§§.. 

^ In the whirly-gig of history, crucifixions often become 
coronations and vice versa. Squalid neglect during a 
man's life is usually regarded as a likely sign of "mys- 
terious" preparation for the higher historical destiny; 
even nailing a Man to a Cross is interpreted as helpful to 
those who are to come after . . . and therefore such 
episodes "must" be important to the man himself ! 
If Worthy material for history ! 

jl In short, if the historical character were neglected or 
forgotten by his own so short-sighted time, the explana- 
tion is that the "point of view" was not right, but later 
the forgotten man becomes a demi-god. 



FOLLY OF FAME AFTER DEATH 29 

Altho this may not be a credit to our intelligence as human 
animals, at least it is helpful to us. "Because," we are 
informed, "history is philosophy teaching by examples." 
jf For a moment let us believe that this famous definition 
is founded on other than quicksand: and therefore let 
us confine our momentary gaze to a pathetic figure, Rem- 
brandt. There are scores of others, but in this history- 
thing, the case of Rembrandt will suffice; for it will 
show whither we are led in this business of historical 
fame, after death. 

§ § § 

jf With all due respect for this historical incense-burning 
for the "preeminent glory of Dutch art" as expressed in 
the "Night Watch," it is questionable whether Rem- 
brandt's generation knew or cared a fig. The man him- 
self rounded out his career chalking cartoons on the side- 
walk. 

To-day, some hundreds of years after Rembrandt's death, 
our library shelves are freighted with history-things on 
the "Night Watch" : its mystery, its witchery, its wonder, 
its profundity, its demi-god qualities. The "tone," es- 
pecially, is dwelt on as well-nigh a miracle, whereas in 
plain fact in this respect the artist was not the Dutchman, 
but Father Time. 

^ To-day, when the name Rembrandt is mentioned it 
must be spoken with uplifted eyes : you must lower your 
voice, for he is forsooth the peculiar "glory" of Dutch art. 
Yet we can imagine, should a murmur of this over-praise 
penetrate the silence of his tomb, his fishy eyes seeing 
vacantly after some centuries of blindness, his dulled 
sense of hearing once more catching an echo from the 
world of living men, this lonesome corpse, we repeat, for 
the moment a man again, would not know himself, nor 
yet the peculiar after-glory that enshrines his name. 



30 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

He himself of all mortals would be the most surprised, 
and would exclaim : "Can this be me ? Or is it some new 
form of mockery, now that the world has had time to 
think up new punishments ? Let me fall asleep again : 
for it is all a terrifying dream, even more hideous than 
were my closing days on earth." 

If Alas, it is too true : the man, Rembrandt, has been 
merged into the "topic," Rembrandt; and being now 
purely impersonal we make such shift as pleases us in 
our history-thing. 

11 Therefore, the man Rembrandt could not grasp our 
high-flown modern mockeries that pass for appreciation : 
for the simple reason that there was no such man as we 
amplify in our exercises in historical imagination. 
j[ However, even this historical absurdity is of value, for 
it exposes our pet history-thing in a new light. A study 
of the psychology behind our waxen-image Rembrandt 
enables us to learn a thing or two of the littleness of 
men's ways; and we grasp likewise the importance of 
writing history — by leaving the man out! 
|[ Off-hand, the present writer knows no more pathetic 
figure (no more mysterious figure), than this self-same 
artist-no-artist, as you will, unless it be the Thief dying 
on the Cross: for the principle of historical judgment is 
parallel. 

Which is to say : Rembrandt's after-death fame and the 
Thief's after-death fame find fixed places in the history- 
thing, side by side. 

In the case of the Thief, this miserable creature, this 
pathetic human life, is now interpreted to mean some- 
thing (we know not what) that makes for the perpetual 
after-glory of mankind ; calling this Thief's end sublime, 
yet in life denouncing him as a thief. 
If you can leap the logical gulf and still retain your 



WITH ALL HIS CRUDITIES 31 

self-respect, you are a worthy disciple of the history- 
thing, as writ. 

§ § § 
^ Before Rembrandt's death, frost fell on his excellent 
reputation as an historical painter; he had had his brief 
acclaim, likewise his gold coins for his work : but all this 
after-cackle, all this brazen-trumpetry, this nauseating 
over-praise about the "Night Watch," these mystical 
meanings as to the man's life and the man's artistic intui- 
tions, as expressed in the familiar phrases of art-mong- 
ers and history mongers: this national self-hypnotism, 
dazzling our minds like some bright ball that puzzles us 
and leads us captive, is a self-constructed situation labor- 
iously built-up. 

If So much for your history-thing, wherein we substitute 
a "topic" for flesh and blood. 

It might as well be a veritable Rogue's March that we 
are recording . . . for the distinction between the 
Rogue's March and history as recorded is not so much 
as the width of a sheet of paper. 

If The great work of the future will be, in this field, to 
write history by putting man in the pages ; and we insist 
on his right to be there, yes, with all his crudities, his 
blood-lusts and his blood-taints: for only by so doing 
will we be able to look ourselves in the eye and decide 
whether we are pleased with the picture. Heretofore, 
we have been pampering and flattering ourselves to death, 
always setting up that we are mightily concerned about 
our relations to our brother: but Winter is coming on, 
and what stored grain is there in the barn? 
Have our over-inflated lying accounts of ourselves, in this 
history-thing, really done us any good? Do we know 
ourselves as we are, as individuals, or as nations? 
Then why so much care that facts may be censored ? 



32 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

If The critics tell us that Rembrandt is a great church- 
man in disguise, whose artistic ideal was essentially 
religious; others, that he aimed to be the supreme psy- 
chologist; others, the master-craftsman; others, the 
inspired preacher; and still others read into the ''topic" 
Rembrandt all manner of god-like virtues: whereby we 
bolster up our conception of a great man. 
^ Do not deceive yourself ! While you and I rave over 
great men, it is a question whether we know a great man 
when we see him; and if so, by what signs? 
Tf Heroes of defeat, one and all, these Immortals, their 
lives an indictment of man's absurd judgments of his 
brother; till at last the practice is after some centuries 
of neglect to rush to the other extreme and to cover the 
stone with laurel wreaths, not forgetting mourning cards 
bearing carefully penned mottoes of affectionate historical 
regard. 

§ § § 

^ In Rembrandt's case the plain fact seems to be that 
taste in paint-daubing had changed ; and the old Jew-heads 
and Jew-figures, counting their gold coins, those vivid 
portraits from the ghetto, done in Rembrandt's bold style, 
were now to fall from favor ; to be replaced by a smooth 
microscopic method very pleasing to the fickle public of 
Rembrandt's later years. 

Hence the old man was forgotten : and our old fool or 
our old master (as you will), rounded out his career 
scratching cartoons at the curb for a drink and a snack. 
]f For men must warm their bellies three times a day, 
with food and drink, but their minds need only such 
nourishment as the chalked-cartoon at the curb. To-day, 
after some centuries, he is termed the "preeminent glory 
of Dutch art," this self-same lonesome old man who pros- 
tituted his powers for a pot. Were they right when they 



SETTLED ORDER DEMANDED 33 

left him there, or are we in our turn fanatical when we 
name him Immortal? 

]f Who knows or cares ... ? It should be, sir, sufficient 
to know that what this Earth demands is settled order; 
and quite naturally she has standardized her methods of 
historical and biographical writing. Sir, why not? 



VI 

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED "GREAT''? 

Tf The harking of a dog, the swelling of a brook, 
the changing of the wind — such are some of the 
frail tools of destiny! How great men are 
brought forward. 

If It has been shown, time and time again, that accident 
and opportunity have had much to do with bringing for- 
ward "our greatest men," as they are usually called in 
the history-scribbles. 

Yes, even Death is an important helper: for mark you 
this, that on the ladder of life, right behind you is always 
the man coming up, crowding for your place. 
If he does not actually pass you by, in the scramble, he 
may decide that no harm will be done if he knocks you 
off. 

Do not take this too seriously. Brush the dust off your 
coat, mend your bruises as best you may, and thank 
Heaven that no bones were broken. 

Console yourself with the reflection that in turn the 
bully that beat you to the top of the wall will soon lose 
his place. In the eternal conflict of defenders and be- 
siegers, a spear will pierce his body, bringing him tum- 
bling into the moat below. 

It matters little the means : the end is inevitable. 
K Such is the human animal, at play. 

34 



LITTLE-BIG AND BIG-LITTLE 35 

1[ "Reputation," says Albert de Montbiliard, son of the 
Shiek of Sahara and my personal friend, "reputation has 
often come to mortal on blind chanc2 ; in this connection 
recall that the date seed dropped from the bill of a flying 
dove finds lodgment in a fertile spot; the lucky kernel 
after a time becomes a tiny green sprout, and in the ful- 
ness of the years flourishes for another generation as the 
mighty monarch of the oasis, admired by all." 

§ § § 
If Two notable generals of our Civil War, Grant and 
Sherman, were in their earlier career so disgusted with 
the military career and its seemingly hopeless chance for 
advance in times of peace, that they resigned from the 
service; but later they rose to fame, thru the accident 
of the great Rebellion. The coming of the war, by the 
way, was due to circumstances with which neither Grant 
nor Sherman had only the remotest personal connec- 
tion. 

Had not the interminable debates of Abolitionists stirred 
up the final strife, Grant might have continued a tanner, 
Sherman a schoolmaster, to the bitter end. 
]f Therefore, we repeat, in estimating "what" a man rep- 
resents, who is to decide? Out of all the seeds in his Bag 
of Life, just which were the ones that, scattered widely, 
did indeed take root : also, tell me likewise which of the 
innumerable fair seeds died of the cut-worm, the crow, 
or perished in the starved soil . . . ? 
1[ We think we know, but it is only another form of our 
conceit. I have known men rise in life to greatness, as 
the history-mongers reckon, thru so simple an oppor- 
tunity as comes by an unexpected fall of rain. Remem- 
ber, had it not rained the night before, at Waterloo, the 
cannon would not have stalled in muddy and impassible 
roads ; and now enters that great man, Wellington. 



36 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

I have numerous other instances in mind, such as the 
changing of the wind, the barking of a dog, the sHpping 
of a horse, yes, the actual mis-reading of a message. 
And to this hour, the photo-play director utilizes exactly 
these, and others, in working out life-stories on the 
screen. 

jf These caprices, as we call them, coming at a moment 
when their far-reaching importance was not clear, in 
turn intermeshed with other vital circumstances no man 
could read or know at the time, but ended by bringing 
forth still another great reputation. 
If Or, taking the reverse side, it is not inconceivable that 
the coward has more than once been acclaimed a notable 
hero, the sinner a saint, the seducer the guardian of 
woman's virtue, the traitor a genuine patriot. 
H Why not . . . ? 

^ For it is the common practice of mankind to place little 
men in high and commanding positions, for the time 
being turning aside the efficient or capable. The rarest 
talent of all is to recognize a good man when you see 
him: and the one black indictment of the cheap and 
nasty money-success is to say simply, "He never helped 
any other man to rise." 

§ § § 

jf Not many years ago, Gen. Wm. Booth, founder of the 

Salvation Army, was repeatedly rotten-egged in the streets 

of London. 

Yet he lived to be reverently referred to as "England's 

Grand Old Man," and in his travels was the guest of 

kings. 

^ Were they right, or are we wrong ? 

II Carlyle hawked, "Sartor Resartus," only to place it in 
a second-rate magazine. 

^ Were they right, or are we wrong ? 



VALOR OF IGNORANCE 37 

fl" Henry George's message, "Progress and Poverty," com- 
posed under depressing conditions, was offered here and 
there, but no editor or pubHsher saw any merit. 
A sympathetic fellow-printer put it in type, and John 
Russell Young peddled a few copies in London. "I tried 
to throw them away," writes Young, "but at last, through 
unexpected sources the great work was recognized, and 
soon followed 60,000 copies a year." 
If Were they right, or are we wrong? 

§ § § 

^ Old examples are wholly as good as those under your 
nose. Recall then that "Paradise Lost" brought Milton 
five pounds ; and put yourself on the defensive to explain 
the stupidity of the wise. 

If Wordsworth confessed to Matthew Arnold, "My dear 
Arnold you talk of the peculiar glory of the poetic art, 
as exemplified by the support of the British; but let me 
whisper something in your ear. For years past, sir, my 
poetry has never brought me enough to pay for my shoe- 
laces." 

^ Nor should we, while speaking of the satire of success, 
fail to recall that "Uncle Tom's Cabin," in spite of its 
world-wide fame in one language after the other (Eng- 
lish, German, Chinese, and we know not what), still was 
originally absolutely refused by publisher after pub- 
lisher. 

No white American at that time recognized any merit 
in the story or its telling. Decidedly, however, this nar- 
rative had a profound impression, hastening the Re- 
bellion. 

So much for our human blindness in reading the future, 
or in knowing a great woman writer when she was act- 
ually before our noses. 
^ We also have it from his own record that Hawthorne, 



38 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

now esteemed the blue-white diamond in our collection 
of American literary gems, "was for years the obscurest 
literary man in America. There is no market for my 
wares," he added. 

TJ Thoreau, another great American literary idol, was no 
exception to the rule of our ignorance of human values. 
A thousand copies of his "Week On the Concord and 
Merrimac Rivers" were struck off by his publisher. After 
a year, the author received word that his work would ' 
not sell, and that seven hundred and six copies were oc- 
cupying cellar-room wanted for other use. 
TJ Accordingly, they were transported from Boston to 
Concord. The work had gone forth in its nakedness and 
now returned in fine clothing of calico and leather, back 
to the old homestead, as so many poor unfortunates who 
have failed in the struggle of life. 

]f Thoreau gave them kindly though sorrowful welcome. 
He laid them on his back and carried them "up two flights 
of stairs to a place similar to that which they traced 
their origin." 

^ *T have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes," 
he said with grim humor, "over seven hundred of which 
I wrote myself." 

§ § § 

1j Man, ignorant and innocent in judging his fellow, tries 

to fortify himself by freely using labels. 
^ "Is he a college man?" "Who was his mother?" 
"What Church does he belong to ?" "What is his politi- 
cal party ?" 

^ Somehow, after Edwin Arnold said that Joaquin Miller 
and Edgar Allen Poe were America's greatest poets, 
somehow, that very statement made a difference, and 
somehow people began to see where they were in dark- 
ness before, 



FOOL'S REVENGE 39 

If Why was this? 

II Somehow, many years after Goodyear invented the 
rubber process, which has done so much to help mankind 
to larger comfort, safety of life and limb and utilities 
unnumbered, somehow then and only then did the idea 
dawn that Goodyear, the former fool, should have a mag- 
nificent monument, as a benefactor of his race. It need 
scarcely be added that Goodyear, at this time was dead 
and passed all need of praise. In life, when he asked for 
bread, they said he was daffy. 
II Why was this ? 

jl Somehow, after LaFollette had for years been called 
a bigot and a fool, a man not to be trusted, somehow it 
came to pass that the things he preached on the floor of 
the Senate (and usually in the good old days received 
there as an impertinence), were later welcomed as bring- 
ing in a new day. 

. § § § . 

^ The irony of man's judgment of his fellow mortal : who 

is to decide "what" you represent, or having decided 

may not, the following moment, change his mind and 

decide in still another way. 

So wearisome is the recital, so dull, so stupid, that the 

judgment of half the race on the other half may well 

justify the ironical phrase used by Balzac in describing 

his serious life-work, "The Comedy of Human Life." 

If We pass in silence that classical instance of man's 

blundering stupidity in estimating human values, the case 

of Columbus. 

They called him "Mad Man." 

They put him in a dungeon and forgot him. 

To Civilization's shame, the very place of this heroic 

sufferer's sepulchre is to this hour unknown, despite 

various spurious allegations of fact, marked by piles 



40 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

of masonry scattered from the Windward Islands to 
Old Spain. 

Mankind, in the great navigator's day, regarded Colum- 
bus's work as not of sufficient importance to do him the 
mean honor even of preserving his dust and marking the 
spot in a grudged cranny in a wall . . . ! 
^ Why was this ? 

Have done with your laborious explanations. Consider 
instead the brute fact of human brag contrasted with 
human blindness. 

How times change, how man's view of his brother change 
with the times. To-day Columbus's fame is forever fixed. 
The crucifixion of the cell has given to the coronation of 
the historian. Too late — his heart is dust ! 
Tf So much for the worth of hypocrisies of history, set up 
to cover our ignorance of human values. 
We simply do not know a good man when he is right 
before our eyes: and our pretense to the contrary is 
merely a preachment inspired by pride of intellect. 
The difference between a wise man and a fool ? Scarcely 
greater than the width of your hand ! 



VII 

LIFE'S AMAZING IRONY 

^Before the new monument a new generation, 
blind to the mockery of it all, submissively kneels 
in worship. Such is life's amazing irony. 

^ Now that we are talking about great strength and great 
weakness it is well to say something of the vague word, 
"great." No man is wise enough to offer a comprehen- 
sive definition of "greatness." 

jf A man must have strong character to face the blows 
of fate. The world is so selfish that it does not know 
who is trying to help along. 

^ Does the world know a great man when it sees him, 
and if so, pray by what signs? 

Blackstock, the American Corot, driven insane by pov- 
erty, passed years in an asylum ; Keats, whose fair fame 
is fixed forever more, yet at twenty-six died victim to 
hunger; America first learned of Poe second-hand, Ger- 
many and England pointing the way ; Whitman had to 
print his own books, even to setting the type ; Hawthorne 
eked out a living doing political odd- jobs ; Meredith 
starved for many a year on oatmeal, and was over sixty 
before England knew his great mind ; Matthew Arnold 
wrote some of his finest work on scraps of paper as he 
traveled around Britain on railroad trains, and nobody 
knew or cared for many years; Goldsmith had to be 

41 



42 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

rescued from a debtors' prison, and was dust before 
England awoke to his genius; Johnson, to pay his 
mother's funeral expenses, sat up all night writing "Ras- 
selas" ; Schiller, hunted like a rat from hole to hole, dared 
to slip out only after dark to nibble cheese ; Mozart was 
buried in a pauper's grave; Beethoven had nothing but 
his art to save him from suicide at his country's ingrati- 
tude and neglect; Schubert, starving cheerfully, was 
helped by one friend who paid for pens and paper, 
another who contributed the room-rent, still another who 
sent cast-ofT clothes; Wagner, long an exile from Ger- 
many, his art scoffed at and held valueless, is to-day ac- 
claimed the peculiar wonder of German musical genius. 
And so it goes ! 

§ § § 
^ There is also the true greatness that stands as a rock 

and is known as integrity. 

IJWhen they offered to make Washington king, he re- 
fused, for his battle was for the Republic; and of the 
thousands of men who walk this earth to-day, sounding 
in public places hollow words for the Republic, and pos- 
ing as the friend of the people, the bribe of king would 
be too much to be set aside. 

^They would surely fall before the temptation and in 
that moment of personal power forget the cause of the 
people. 

jf But the fable is that Washington refused to be made 
king — and his fame will live. 

§ § § 

If In a world of little men, there is another use of the 
word "great." It applies to a life spent in struggles 
against powerful wrongs ; and in this hard school are 
many whose names will never be recorded in Halls of 
Fame, but for all that their work has not been in vain. 



HEROES OF DEFEAT 43 

|[ There are also the wise men who by their firmness for 
right and justice set about it to bring what are called 
reforms in society. We refer to martyrs like John Brown, 
the fanatic for the slave ; Socrates, drinking the hemlock ; 
Marius, at the ruins of Carthage. 

If Their paths are stony and it is well with them if they 
escape the lash or the gallows, for the blind world has 
long before this stoned its great men to death for their 
opinions — and many years later, has, as has been so beau- 
tifully said, ''gathered up the stones and builded them 
into a magnificent monument." Yes, with orations, 
bands of music, soldiers, bells ringing, and joy far and 
wide through lands. 

^ In this grotesque reversal of opinion, man sees no in- 
consistency. He is too conceited for that. 

§ § § 

jf Matthew suffered martyrdom, by the sword. 
If Mark, dragged through the streets of Alexandria, ex- 
pired a victim to the brutality of the mob. 
]f In Greece, Luke was hanged on an olive tree. 
If John, put in a cauldron of boiling oil, at Rome, escaped 
and later died a natural death at Ephesia. 
If James the Great was beheaded. 

jf James the Less was thrown from a pinnacle of the 
temple, and beaten to death with a fuller's club. 
Tf Phillip was hanged up against a pillar at Hierapolis, 
a city of Phrygia. 
^ Bartholomew was flayed alive. 

jf Andrew, bound to a cross, preached to the people till 
he expired. 

If Thomas was run through the body with a lance. 
If Jude was shot to death with arrows. 
It Simeon Zealotes was crucified, and the place was Persia. 
If Matthias was first stoned and then beheaded, 



44 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

If Peter was crucified, with his head downwards. 
jf Paul, the last and chief of the apostles, died of violence. 
ij So much for man's judgment of his fellow-mortal, 
and his conception of the word "great." Life's amazing 
irony ! 



VIII 

THE WREATH OF CYPRESS 

^ When you are dead, it will make little differ- 
ence to you what is said of you, and mankind 
sees no inconsistency in the bleat of words. 

^How little man is able to estimate justly the work of 
his fellow-man is seen in many ways; but in none more 
astonishing than in the attitude of the living toward 
the living. 

^Whenever the suggestion is made that a comprehen- 
sive biography be penned of some leader of the hour, 
the usual answer is, "A just and life-like portrait, aiming 
to depict without prejudice a contemporary, is impossible. 
The thing to do is to wait till he is dead !" 
^ That mankind elects to wait till the man is dead before 
writing his history is at once an indictment of the living 
and a satire on the tomb. 

^ Yes, when his lips are dumb, his eyes closed, his ears 
hear no more, his whole being fallen under the midnight 
of impersonality, in the ground, then it is that we come 
forth with our estimates, our memoirs and our apprecia- 
tions. 

If But you ask, why all this delay ? 

jf The fierce struggles of ambition, intrigue and blood- 
shed disclose that the foregoing condition is inevitable. 

45 



46 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

^ Men have curious words of felicitation for the dead, 
for the dead being effaced from the competitions of Ufe, 
death silences malicious tongues. 

jf The man that now measures his length in the insensate 
sod, this man is now beyond all human praises, or their 
need. 

^ Not even the vilest human beast envies the slim green 
estate, six feet long and elbow-wide. 
jf Kind thoughts are kindled on the altar of memory 
mounting as a sacred flame of praise. 
If As time passes, the man's real traits, weaknesses and 
follies merge more and more into the encircling gloom. 
^ At last History, after the Rembrandt style of art, 
pierces the dark with a core of light, leveled on one spot 
only, bringing it into vivid relief. 

^ Or, time passing more and more, the years giving to 
decades, the decades to centuries, an image is erected of 
colossal size, a myth-man, whose like never walked this 
earth. 

^ Hearing the strange story second-hand, another gener- 
ation, comes close, falls down and worships before this 
superman; and being on their knees and in a strained 
position, naturally the statue is immensely foreshortened — 
till it looms upward to the skies! 



IX 

HISTORY TEACHES MAN NOTHING 

^ Our history-things, with pretense to smug offic- 
ialism, not to say righteousness in our National 
utterances, constantly remind us that the sun is 
high in the Heavens and that we are on the for- 
ward march: but may we not still be asleep in 
our beds, our minds a bat's cave of 
dreams . . . f 

1[ We prate of the lessons of history, at the same moment 
doing all in our power to conceal thru our historical- 
things the realities of life. They, pray, what is the func- 
tion of the old-line history-scribble? 
1[ We prate of the lessons of history, but are there les- 
sons beyond this : that man is as he is ? 
We have read history in tale, poem, moving-picture, news- 
paper-column, and on stones in the cemetery : and it is 
all alike. 

Man likes to set forth in his official utterances that, thru 
devotion to the social order, human beings are gradually 
ceasing to be human beings, substituting for flesh and 
blood certain physical and mental euphemisms wherein 
no brash word betrays the under-surface of life as act- 
ually lived, as against the literary methods used to pre- 
sent life in books and documents. 
This indictment includes also the singular record of our 

47 



48 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

official righteousness, as set forth in the President's Mes- 
sage, apropos of our "humanity" in the sale of munitions. 
^ And all this weird historical-thing persists in the face 
of the fact that man continues to repeat, generation after 
generation, the essential qualities of human nature, each 
individual striving for the freest realization of his con- 
ception of the v^ord "important"; yet strangely enough, 
man's official documents would have us believe that man 
is ceasing to be a human being. 

Unwilling to appear as he is, he insists on representing 
himself as he is not, more especially as he is not in his 
solemn and owlish writings known as biography and 
history. 

§ § § 

If The quality called hope and the word smug have long 
assured us that morally we have gone far, indeed. The 
general history-thing tendency is to proclaim as already 
reached certain distant and highly imaginary goals of 
Brotherhood, much thundered about in the index but 
later glossed over mightily in the actual text. 
IJTo those mere mortals that fail to reach the heights, 
the charge "nominal" is flung back, this is, nominal in- 
stead of real this-or-that ; nominal Christians instead of 
real Christians, for example. 

This line of defensive trenches has been hastily digged 
since the great War of 1914; and the conventional up- 
holders of the lies of society see no inconsistency in 
charging that Christianity, except the "nominal" kind, 
does not exist in England, Germany, Austria, France, 
Italy, Russia, or elsewhere in the great European war- 
zone. The difficulty is not with man or nation, but 
with failure to stand by something dogmatic, exclusive 
or ecclesiastical, so we are solemnly assured. 



BLOOD-LUST TO PSALMS 49 

If Science tells us : no cause without effect, no effect with- 
out cause : hence we see in this history-thing appertaining 
to the great War of 1914, that man is already talking of 
a "new" religion to come out of the War. The inevitable 
reaction from blood-lust to psalm-singing is very simple. 
It expresses no new aspiration of humanity, however 
egotistically that end may be proclaimed as centering 
around some "new" form of social idealism. 
If The appeal at best, is merely from Philip drunk to 
Philip sober. 

^ Man, having indulged his world-wide saturnalia of 
hatred and suspicion, murdering by machinery five 
millions of human beings, it is but natural that the broth- 
ers, in an enthusiasm of admiration, should therafter 
fall into each other's arms. 

Any "new" religion coming therefrom will not necessar- 
ily be an exemplification of brotherhood — any more than 
were hundreds of prior politico-religious appeals, down 
thru the dusty corridors of the Past. 
jf Man will continue to be a man, act like a man, live 
like a man, just as he always has. 

Nor must we fail to point out the knothole in the wall, 
to wit, that man, in addition, will study to present him- 
self as he is not : and here the fight for the newer intel- 
lectual freedom must begin ! 

^ Why does man prefer to present himself, as he is not? 
jf Ask no riddles : look around, and make up your mind. 
Then frame your own answer. 

§ § § 

If Do Americans grow each day more stupid, more selfish ? 
In this Republic, especially, we are daily fed on the fal- 
lacy that the one "great" modern achievement is embodied 
in our smiling attitude toward the struggle for existence. 
Optimism, that special gift of the gods, will cure all ills. 



50 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

The accepted pastors, poets, philosophers of the day 
admonish us in a hundred coaxing phrases ''never" to 
lose our poise; we are to ''think happiness," we are to 
keep away from trouble, more particularly sad scenes; 
we are to sing and dance ; and especially should we repeat 
this formula mornings on awaking and at night when we 
sink to sleep : "All's well with the world !" 
Finally, some millions of men and women in this Repub- 
lic have carried this moral optimism-run-mad to the point 
where they accept the preachment that even death itself 
does not exist for the true optimist ; death is classed as 
"National prosperity," more especially death by Ameri- 
can-made cannon : till the rivers of Europe run red with 
blood. 

^ That sound thinking should precede belief is no longer 
held of avail. With soft flatteries, man strives to lull 
himself by turning away his eyes from the cruelties and 
injustice in Society, endeavors to read the problems of 
existence out of being by the simple expedient of keep- 
ing them out of mind. 

Deceive yourself no longer. All this style of optimism- 
gone-mad is only another vicious form of the history- 
monger's art, wherein spurious virtues are set up to 
masquerade as realities. 

jf Instead, let us denounce Civilization for its brutality ; 
let us tell for once, for the good of our immortal souls, 
not how great we are but how low we sunk ; let us dwell 
on the spirit of injustice, with which this earth abounds ; 
and no longer hide our shame in the perversion of the art 
of writing till, like the eunuch in the harem, the only 
safe writer like the only safe man is the one deprived of 
virility, weakened by expurgation . . . the castrated writer. 

§ § § 

If Look round and reflect that at no time in the recorded 



DESTINY OR DESTINATION 51 

history of mankind has there not been incessant rivalry 
and feud ; also that side by side with dissention has come 
the idea of progress. We certainly do ''progress," but 
in what direction? 

^ Some writers persistently use the words "manifest des- 
tiny" in talking about the "direction" America is going; 
meaning that we are under the protecting hand of Provi- 
dence. 

May not this be changed to an excess of faith, such as 
David had in Bible times, or Cromwell in English politi- 
cal life? The great Commoner was able to justify bru- 
talities by declaring that the Lord was on his side. "Trust 
in the Lord," was his prayer, "but keep your powder 
dry." 

Cromwell did not see in his satire on faith any impeach- 
ment of Providence, any confession of weakness or lack 
of logic ; he solemnly held to the theory of manifest des- 
tiny. 

If Use your common sense. There is sharp distinction 
between destiny and destination. It is conceivable that 
we might, from certain general political tendencies for 
example, foreshadow or predict the direction in which 
these United States are moving ; but whether we are now 
prepared to leap the gulf and proclaim that this direc- 
tion is an exhibit of manifest destiny in the politico- 
religious sense, is wholly another matter. Yet this is the 
mental attitude set forth by many of our National history- 
mongers till our moral conceit is pitiful, contrasted with 
our real lives. 

If Let us take one or two concrete cases : An American 
election is the expression of the will of the majority 
(maybe) but is it necessarily a sign of a destiny, or is it 
instead only a sign of a destination? 
If The invention of the steam engine, spinning and weav- 



52 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

ing machines, telephone, phonograph, and the others, have 
made for certain additional closeness of human relations 
on the social, business and practical side; but are we to 
deduce from this that the regeneration of mankind, the 
New Hope, the New Jerusalem, is to be ushered in by an 
era of machinery? 

If The discovery of the circulation of the blood, vaccina- 
tion, the use of various antiseptics, lymphs and anti-tox- 
ines, tend likewise to create a larger and a closer com- 
munity of interest together with a better human under- 
standing; hence men are constantly expressing the hope 
that science will, nay already has prolonged the average 
period of human life; has to a certain extent banished 
pain from the sickroom and has made life more endurable, 
as we pass along — but are these hopes of longevity and 
greater average freedom from aches and fevers to be read 
indeed as tokens of manifest destiny behind the pro- 
nouncements of science, or on the other side is it any more 
than the indication of a general direction, often changed, 
often swerved from, often set aside, often contradicted 
by later discoveries, and often subsequently proven totally 
false and hopeless? 

For it must not be forgotten that science has its blunder- 
ings, no less than politics or invention. 
Or as Sheridan Ford says: "In these days of hurried 
and unthinking effort, remedies insist upon their diseases 
that Science may triumph and no time be lost.'* 

§ § .§ 

^ Men glorify law and order, in public : yet in private 
seek to set aside the restraints of law and order. 
^ Even should the prisoner in a moment of acute honesty 
plead "guilty," and be held to appear for sentence, it is 
not unlikely that, in the interim, peculiar changes take 
place in his mind. 



"NOT GUILTY!" 53 

^ On the morrow, the lawyer steps forward and requests 
that the plea be changed to "not guilty ;" that the prisoner 
was "not himself" when he made the former admission ; 
that the prisoner was in an "abnormal state of mind and 
did not know what he was doing." 

^ This strange situation is repeated daily in courts thru- 
out America. Every man arraigned is "not guilty." 
U I have seen a man stab a victim with a knife, then plead 
"Not guilty" a few moments later. 

^ I have seen a woman throw acid on another woman's 
dress, and when arraigned plead "Not guilty." 
^ I have seen a thief snatch a purse in a crowded street, 
only to tell the judge "Not guilty, your honor." 
j[ I have known a man to forge signatures to a mortgage, 
flee the country, live in luxury in foreign lands, under a 
fictitious name, and when brought back enter his plea, 
"Not guilty." 

|[And altho few men are deceived, the fiction is set up 
that when the man flourished the knife he was not him- 
self ; when he stole the purse, he was not himself ; when 
he forged the mortgage, or seduced the girl, he was not 
himself. Never is man "himself" in his uncritical mo- 
ments, but always the victim to bad men or bad laws. 
^ What curse has fallen on this our race that men instinc- 
tively dread and fear each other in their books and writ- 
ings ; and to our inevitable isolation, as individual human 
beings, we do now deliberately add the frightful weight 
of historical hypocrisy to misdirect the inquiring eye : we 
call East the West, the moon the sun ; we picture pinch- 
beck as gold, pebbles as diamonds ; our national glutton- 
ies masquerade as abstinence, our national shams as 
Sealities, our national hates as love, our national greed 
cis generosity, our national curses as prayers; — till thus 
we would link our little lives with the eternal God . . , 



54 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

If Not how great we are, but how low we sunk is the 
thing . . . Come, why not? Surely you do not expect 
a man to make confession against himself? 
^ Do these words convict us of holding that life is essen- 
tially ''something evil?" 
Not at all ! 

Fighting, loving, praying — such is life summed up. A 
blow, in the fighting; a kiss, in the loving; a prayer, in 
the praying. Kisses and curses are equally sweet, in 
their proper places as all men well know ; — and a prayer 
ends life's strange scene. 

And if you ask me "why" man is that way, I can only 
reply : Because he "is" that way ; nor is there any good 
reason why he should "not" continue to be that way, 
regardless of the cunning of his apt-historians. 
j[One thing, at least, is settled: he will never tell the 
truth about himself in his books or official documents. 
Any writing intended for more than one pair of eyes 
may be depended upon to depart from reality to this ex- 
tent, always : to do whatever is necessary in order not to 
dispel the illusion of brotherhood. 
If How is this farce kept up, in history ? 
Man, refusing to apply cause and effect, substitutes some 
little, immediate "cause" and passes the big causes. 
He seems to be afraid of his own part, as a human being. 
For example, during the great War of 1914, many able 
writers lashed themselves into fury trying to show that 
"all" came about thru a broken treaty — more or less, 
here or there. 

The part played by man, the fighter, was insolently re- 
jected; and we behold historians thundering about the 
faulty politico-religious construction of society, regard- 
less of ten thousand instances wherein it is clearly shown 
that no enterprise of politics whatsoever but comes to 



THE VILE POSE 55 

grief at last, not because it is faulty or less faulty, but 
because of human nature. 

Civilization after Civilization has crumbled to ruin not 
because the plan was not good enough as a plan, but be- 
cause in the end men will have their way. 

. § § § 

TJ There is no question that man's recorded ignorance re- 
garding himself and his little ways, as slurred over in 
historical writings, is in itself still another vile pose to 
support certain forms of national, civic or individual 
conceit, rather than face fundamental facts. 
Even a crude examination of origins and causations in 
social maladies under which we groan, would suggest 
that if we ever hope to advance we no longer deceive 
ourselves by glorifying bits of fact, detached and float- 
ing twixt earth and sky, idealizing men's ways. 
We should begin by facing man, himself, and noting 
closely his little ways; this should be the great fact in 
the thing called history, but thus far it has been least 
honored. 

^ The fundamental truth we have pointed out about man's 
historical pretensions is so simple that its value may 
well be overlooked. 

It need not take long then to see that the great "why" 
between promise and performance, religious, social or 
political, resolves itself into the eternal conflict to warp 
man over from what he secretly is to something that he 
pretends to accept in public, but in private protests 
against. 

Machine-driven politics, machine-driven religions find you 
as you are and leave you as you were : regardless of the 
proud brag of a social order built on something more than 
hypocrisy and deceit. 
With a steeple every half mile, a school house on every 



S6 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

second corner, and a political harangue at every cross- 
roads, we change and change again our man-made laws 
and once more herald the better day : but these laws leave 
man's heart untouched; for the simple reason that man 
was man long before he was a lawyer — and will remain 
a man long after the race of lawyers has passed into 
oblivion. 

§ § § 

^Although there is a wide gulf between repealing one 
man-made law and passing another, and thus entering 
the New Utopia, man likes to make himself believe that 
the "new" politics or the "new" religion will enact the 
missing miracle. 

This explains how prone we are, one and all, to support 
for public consumption absurd reports of spurious indi- 
vidual, civic or national politico-religious codes, as against 
known private performances. 

Everywhere of late years thru this land we have seen to 
the point of mental nausea the reforming-fellow with his 
new moralities, his new religion, his new progressive 
politics; protesting in pious piffle the essential unity of 
nations. 

^ Yes, let our loud-mouthed reforming editor, a freak 
in very appearance, this very day put on, to create the 
proper mental hocus-pocus, his tin crown and his yellow 
robe of cotton cloth, and mounting his soap-box at the 
curb proceed now with his Heaven-defying harangue. 
At the psychological moment he brings out his many- 
paged Scroll of the Referendum and you and I start for- 
ward, to sign; sign we scarcely know what, but in the 
general excitement sign we do ; not without a certain 
inner righteousness bordering on moral indignation that 
we did not sign the thing, long ago, to wit : 
^ That the sex-instinct be limited to breeding, only, within 



"IF" 5,000 "BELIEVE" ? 57 

the law, and having once bred, it is ordained that man 
shall die. 

If That woman shall no longer use her fatal spell of beauty, 
to ensnare men. 

If That a child born out of wedlock shall be branded with 
a tiny fleur-de-lis, making clear his inferiority to the child 
born in wedlock ; regardless of the fact that all the mid- 
wives in Chicago surveying two new-born babes, one the 
child of love, the other the offspring of state-officialism 
(as certified by a 75-cent wedding license), are unable to 
tell one from the other, knowing no names or pedigrees. 
If Or, our reforming-fellow urges that all the vines in 
America be uprooted, and sign that we certainly do with 
a sort of mock-heroic final flourish of our busy, social 
goosequill. 

If Thus do we play the braggart with our brother's busi- 
ness and find glory in announcing that if "500 believe," 
it must be a sign of more truth, than if "only one be- 
lieved." And when 5000 "believe," not only is the new 
idea important, but is a veritable sign of manifest destiny. 
We are now committed to these particular politico-relig- 
ious attitudes, as against all other politico-religious atti- 
tudes whatsoever, offered by rival reforming-fellows : 
at least for the time being our lot is cast with our particu- 
lar reformer and his particular attitudes. Henceforth, 
we glory in the moral uplift that comes of counting 
ourselves of some new church, party, or cult. 

§ § .§ 

If To maintain undisturbed the iridescent dream of man's 
moral obligation about his brother, is the one solemn duty 
of kept-historians. 

Therefore, in all writings intended for the public eye, 
man supports a strict and hideous censorship in National 
history, morals and manners; a jealously guarded control 



S8 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

over all scribblings makes impossible any picture of the 
under surface, as against outward appearances. 
If "Cut out 100 feet of film," says the moving-picture 
censor, headed by the dignified Madam Grundy, "this will 
never do ; it is too scandalous." 

If "Blue-pencil that love episode," orders the publisher, 
"or we will be arrested for improper use of the mails." 
^ "Tone down that scene where the man refuses to salute 
the flag ; it is unpatriotic," urges the stage director. 
^ To keep the surface of Society unruffled even by so 
much as a disturbing ripple, regardless of the sink-hole 
beneath, is the nominal ideal behind all writings intended 
for general delectation. 

j[ What abnormal something is gratified by censor-hypoc- 
risies in poems, pictures and histories? 
11 To read man's international remarks, more especially 
his congratulatory resolutions, treaties and agreements, 
is in truth little more than to listen to a braggart's tale, 
full of sound but wanting in sincerity : a tale ballooned to 
the bursting : a tale termed historical but in reality a con- 
ventional pose of Society, used to bolster up the "should 
be" in the "already is." 

§ § § 

If If all those vast human swarms, black, brown, red, 
yellow and white, that at present crawl like ants over this 
Earth should of a sudden perish utterly in stupendous 
world-racking catastrophe bringing chaos to reign again, 
this fair globe now a black and voiceless ruin swinging 
thru space in utter darkness, dead, without seed or fires 
whatsoever : nor mortal stick nor stone remained of it all, 
with the sole exception of a shelf of books writ in times of 
old and called "histories" : and in the fulness of a New 
Time, let us say 100,000 years hence, a strange people 
should descend from the planet Mars; and the greatest 



MISUSES OF POWER 59 

scholar amongst them after vast researches should find, in 
some deviHsh way, the actual key to our lost alphabet, as 
seen in the miraculously preserved book-scribbles: then 
this supreme question, Whether after translating the 
books, line for line, the explorers would obtain a true 
picture of the race that perished ? 

If Would intimate companionship with a shelf of histories, 
even tho it were half a mile long, acquaint the newcomers 
with the heart of the vanished people? 
If We reply at once that, herein, a certain bitter satire 
between life as lived, and life as reported for historical 
consumption, invariably nullifies the sincerity of the 
printed word. The width of this chasm is known to 
those who have had experience in the ways of the world, 
If Not only would the savant from Mars be unable to 
learn, from our own reports, what manner of men we 
were, but also would it utterly escape him that every 
class on this Earth always strove to have offences which 
injured that class subjected to extreme penalty, yet prated 
of Brotherhood : for misuses of power by religious sects, 
political parties, as well as by individuals in their private 
lives, are so obscurred by glorification of kept-historians 
that Vice is always masquerading in the robes of Virtue ; 
and no crime so great that expediency of some sort is 
not ultimately set up to condone : as for example the 
underlying causes of the great War of 1914. 



THE HUMAN KALEIDOSCOPE 

^From age to age, it has been the practice of 
history-mongers to flatter our pride by telling us 
how great we were, not how low we sunk: till we 
have come to believe that History is not a record 
of men's little ways, but of the doings of demi- 
gods . . . 

If A strong leader, by tireless repetition of some idea, 
finally brings about faith in that idea. It does not follow 
that this leader must necessarily be wiser than the masses. 
Often he may be proven a charlatan, but this does not 
justify cynical damnation. The mountebank is swayed, 
even as you are, by pride, passion and prejudice. It is 
always his will to power, or your will to power, rather 
than the inherent validity of his ideas or your ideas ! 
^ First, he stands alone with his idea, whatever it may 
be. He keeps repeating it, but no one listens. Finally, 
one person is convinced! This is the beginning. Well, 
if one, why not two, then ten, then a hundred, or a thou- 
sand, or ten thousand ? 
If And so the wonder grows. 

jJAt last, our stubborn man with the idea is believed! 
He now has his long-awaited day to prove the force of 
his contribution to human welfare. 
U Here enters a strange fallacy. 

do 



DO WE STAND THE TEST? 6i 

^ The people expect some new form, or change of gov- 
ernment, to make them happy and free. The machinery 
of legislation is the thing. It is proclaimed the great 
leveler. 

If Thus men eagerly try all manner of political enterprises, 
believing that ultimately in some plan of government, 
social equality will result. In the light of the anomaly 
that in spite of our efforts, we persist in reverence for 
"the good old" days, as against the iniquities of the mo- 
ment, it is clear that either we deceive ourselves, or are 
forever wandering about in a fool's paradise. 
If In this regard, is our Republic any happier to-day 
under forty-eight States than under the original thirteen ? 
Or, if the test be not happiness but religion, can it be 
shown that we now observe the Golden Rule more than 
did our fathers? Or, if the test be neither gaiety nor 
Golden Rule, then is it our golden mountain, heaped in 
trafficking in battles ? These are great questions ! 
^ Have done with your high-sounding gibberish, your 
mock-heroics and your shams, flattering man to death: 
history should be neither more nor less than the stark 
story of the human heart, or human nature in action. 
T[ We have had too little of it in the past : man has thus 
far been afraid of his own record, has refrained from 
picturing himself as he is, and has substituted a spurious 
history-thing compounded of self-conceits and lies. 
This peculiar, lying type of writing has mightily pleased 
man, in times gone by ; but the lid was off when the Great 
War burst into fury : no longer could man conceal from 
himself the essentials of his nature. Kept-historians have 
been mightily put to it ever since to censor the facts. 
^ There will always be a new crop of Immortals, no 
doubt, but henceforth it is going to be more difficult to 
conceal the strings that make the puppets dance. 



62 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

^ We need a king ! A king should be such-and-such. 
He must act thus-and-so. Lay out the purple robe, the 
ermine, the crown, the sceptre, the globe of this Earth. 
If Even in this Republic, has not the cry gone forth, afar : 
We need an heroic figure, carrying the burdens of human- 
ity and fighting the battles of humanity. We do not 
want a mere man; we prefer a demi-god. Thus, our 
Nation's glory will be embellished. 

Tf By cutting and shuffling, by keeping the man out of it, 
by repression and by blue-penciling, at last with much 
pains we laboriously create our royal fellow, tricked in 
precious ermine-trimmed robes ; — and when he speaks the 
world must stand agape. 

^ Is it not high time we were done with this historical 
anti-gravity, forced to view our king (who after all is 
a mere mortal), dangling 'tween Heaven and Earth; with 
no familiar frailties of flesh and blood to prove him 
brother to the common man? This overdone history- 
thing is getting on our nerves. It is not honest. It is 
crooked. It feeds us on wind and gas. 

§ § § 

If We are thinking at this moment of many names, made 
"great" by incessant pounding of brass. Instead, the 
crude man were good enough ! 

It is a pity that human weaknesses should be so over- 
laid with fluff and embroidery that the erring fellow mas- 
querades as a moral giant. The old-line idea of brag 
in history-things has long obscurred our dearly beloved 
sins and takes delight instead in looking on man — decid- 
edly as he is not. Is man ashamed of himself, otherwise 
why does he prefer to present himself as he is not . . . ? 
^ Open the history-thing book anywhere, at haphazard. 
Presto, we chance upon the mock-heroic. The case will 
suffice for hundreds, up and down the scale. The prin- 



"IMMORTAL JOHN" 63 

ciple we seek is the psychology behind the history-thing. 
The idea is to flatter the human animal. 
If Immortal John, made "immortal" largely by literary 
tricks repeated till accepted as Holy Writ. This miser- 
able hypochondriac, now dubbed "immortal," as we read 
here, was, in his own time, classed as a jail-bird. During 
the miserable years of his prison "den," when the heav- 
enly light was supposed to be streaming thru his mind, 
John Bunyan sat in his cell writing down his musings of 
the hypochondriac. 

Sometimes, John stood by the gate, chained to the ankle, 
hawking miserable cotton laces in the hope of a coin 
to help feed his famished guts. When not writing, John 
wove lace; and Bedford town often saw this miserable 
wretch ("Immortal John" they call him now), going half 
blind twisting his cotton meshes. 

John's fellow-prisoners, in the upper tiers, begged by 
using a stocking hitched to a string and dropped to the 
street level ; the prisoners downstairs tied a spoon to a 
stick and thrust it under the noses of passers-by. 
Vermin swarmed, the cells were dank, prison-fever took 
off many of the lads, but John Bunyan survived to be 
dubbed "immortal" by a generation that knew him not. 
^ Immortal ? And in leg-irons ? So much for man's 
judgment, as expressed in history, when talking of his 
fellow-man ! The very breath of John's foul hole fairly 
knocked you down; square narrow walls, torture-cham- 
bers; drainless vaults reeked their miasma; frightful 
cruelties were practised, and there is a story that has 
crept down the years telling of the machine used to tear 
hair from the scalp. 

§ § § 
^ Bunyan had a chance to get away, but preferred pres- 
ent wretchedness to miseries he knew not of. British 



64 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

judges were wont to menace men like Bunyan with dread- 
ful penalties, till the prisoner in self-defense, as it were, 
would petition to be sent beyond seas, and thereupon 
court attaches would seize, gag, chain hand and foot, such 
petitioner, bundling him on board for China or Jamaica, 
there to be sold into slavery. 

^ Thus even so simple an act as knotting threads is 
spattered with blood and tears, altho the later generation 
finds the victim a poet and proclaims him Immortal John 
Bunyan. We get around our stupidity of judgment in 
various ways, but chiefly by closing our eyes and calling 
on history to tell us of patent rights for new spinning 
or weaving machines, names of inventors, dates, docu- 
ments ; and we present our history of weaving in imper- 
sonal terms, largely, such as imports and exports, pay 
roll, and what you please ; always by a species of historical 
anti-gravity keeping John Bunyan and his ilk out of it, 
endeavoring to detach all human elements ; and charging 
to the glory of national commerce the edging of coarse 
cotton on the peasant's petticoat over which John and 
his crucified kind slaved in dungeons. 
If For those ardent supporters of conventional lies of 
history who v/ould use the so-called "evolution of ma- 
chinery" to support a comforting theory of upward Civi- 
lization, we might as well, with equal logic turn the thing 
upside. 

Instead of showing man's ingenious assaults on Nature, 
by substituting machine power for human fingers, the 
facts of mechanical progress (in this instance weaving), 
certainly show man's beastly assaults on his own kind. 
^ The high and mighty school of historians have too long 
replied with their manifest destinies, shining bright and 
clear thru men's ways ; loudly asserting that this Age of 
Machinery with its innumerable cogs and wheels upholds 



BRASS, TIN, IRON, COPPER 65 

the convenient dogma that, side by side with our amaz- 
ing mechanical ingenuities, we now support correspond- 
ing moral improvement in man, himself ; but compare 
these observations, imaginings and protestations with the 
known and secret facts of life as lived, and as you know 
it is lived, and your pompously-termed progress is to be 
taken, instead, merely as another heart-breaking token of 
man's enormous egotism. 

§ § § 

If Man in his march does unusual things, and quite natu- 
rally confuses his progress in mechanics with his spirit- 
ual ideals : holding that the redemption of this earth is 
to come thru certain ameliorations and conveniences asso- 
ciated with combinations of brass, tin, iron, copper, and 
other metals. These inventions will help carry him to 
Heaven on flowery beds of ease: 

If Foods that to a certain extent make him less dependent 
on Nature — 

^ Eyeglasses to overcome failing sight — 
jf Encasing his feet in the hide of the bull instead of 
going barefooted — 

If Utilizing electric waves to send messages — 
jf Clothing his body against the winter's storms, thru the 
art of weaving — 

If Traveling swiftly in his automobile, in places where his 
grandfather laboriously used oxen — 
]f And finally, also to go forward by patroling the streets 
with men called police, carrying revolvers and clubs ; and 
by setting up stone buildings with barred windows for 
the forcible detention of those who, as they say, commit 
crimes against society. 

If Now here is the curious conflict between man, as a 
natural man, and man as a member of society: That as 
time passes man tries to make himself believe that he is 



66 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

on this earth to carry out a social, religious and artistic 
prog-ramme ; and that, in proportion as he adheres to what 
are known as the best inventions of his little hour he is a 
good man, otherwise he is a bad man. 
jf All this is denominated "progress." 

§ § § 

]f If the coming of electricity, motor-cars, telephones, and 
the other triumphs of this much-acclaimed Age of Ma- 
chinery, is supposed to imply a corresponding moral in- 
crease in man's stature, side by side with the mechanical 
giants he has created, then why does man prostitute his 
noblest inventions to help him kill wholesale, by machin- 
ery? 

If The Napoleonic wars were fought with flint-lock muz- 
zle-loaders, with smooth-barrels, letting the bullets fly 
where they might: came next the breach-loader with its 
mechanism for more deadly slaughter, yet only one ball 
of lead out of 600 did find the heart in Wellington's 
campaigns ; at Spiechern the Germans, reasoning more 
closely in mechanics, killed off one Frenchman with each 
279th volley, and at Woerth the death toll, bullet for 
heart, was one corpse for 147 balls of lead ; but so much 
did Society progress in our much-lauded Age of Machin- 
ery that in the Russo-Turko war one victim died for each 
66 bullets fired ; — and what the frightful harvest of death 
may be figured, bullet for bullet, in the momentous War 
begun in 1914, will prove the American advance in kill- 
ing by machinery, made since the crude days of 1800! 
^ Devising more cunning ways of doing cruelties, at the 
same time we turn our eyes to the skies and thank our 
God that we do indeed exemplify in history the manifest 
destiny that so long our historians have assured us is ours. 
If Until it can be shown that the heart, to-day, differs 
from the heart of old, the statistics on which we rely to 



WOLVES OF PROGRESS (^y 

support our pride fall by the wayside. The story of our 
battles, kingly lines, political parties, crop reports, oil 
exports, balance of trade, assumes the latter-day develop- 
ment of the individual man beyond his father. And this 
is true in some respects — ^but not in the v^^ay we would 
have it appear. 

The mockery of this type of history is found in this: 
that you could know it from end to end and not know 
man, as he is. 

The ancient and honorable ideal that the American 
statesman fortifies himself by the study of history is 
merely to ask for bread and being forced to lick a plate 
of brass. 

§ § § 

\ This is what we are told : that perfected individuals 
compose the grand order of our National light bearers ; 
that Civilization goes forward by a crooked road, now a 
short advance, again a rear-curve; a crop of wheat and 
a crop of tares ; harvest and blight, blight and harvest ; 
fat years succeeded by lean ; — but all the while man rises 
to higher things, century after century. 
\ This is what we know : in blood and tears we do strug- 
gle up and down this Earth seeking our satisfactions, 
nations as well as individuals, and refusing to yield our 
advantages, even as you and I do that identical thing in 
our petty affairs. 

Thus we are forced to piece together our pitiful historical 
mumblings about our glorious intentions, and solemnly 
proclaim our National moralities. 

Lincoln abolished slavery, but a thousand types of slavery 
exist at this very hour, as they always have; Howard 
reformed the prisons of England, but a thousand hidden 
prisons still exist, as they always have. 
No more suffering for the weavers, we solemnly protest, 



68 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

after certain legal reforms following the weavers* riots 
of 1815, no more weavers dying for lack of bread. 
Yet in 191 5, we take some hundreds of thousands of 
weavers from their spindles, put rifles in their hands and 
send them out to enact the role of butchers. 
Then we lie to ourselves in our books and we censor the 
news, fearing the light of day on our conduct; and as 
fast as we are unmasked we plead justification. 
It is as tho our historians, closing their eyes to the fact 
that at no time on this Earth has there been peace, occupy 
themselves even while the storms are raging in plugging 
up holes in the social dyke as fast as the angry waters 
rise, while ignoring, nay denying the ever-present hurri- 
cane. 

]f But, on the other hand, we pass our days reporting lies, 
largely, and crying out that all's well, as tho we were 
afraid to take a good look at ourselves in the glass of 
Time. Certain it is that we may not overcome the morbid 
growths of Society unless we are willing to make frank 
confession at home : that we may thus gather truths upon 
which to support a real theory of origins and causation 
will never come to pass as long as man persists in flatter- 
ing his self-conceit, thru the scribblings of kept-historians. 
^ If now all this artificial building up and tearing down 
of one theory after the other, in religion, society or poli- 
tics, is of the stupendous importance writers would have 
us believe, why not for once construct a society wherein 
man may act in accordance with his inherent nature, and 
at the same time not offend ? 

Why may not the irreconciliable breach between man's 
ways and man's conception of a superior social order be 
bridged ? 

]f Man himself stands in the way. His very rebellion 
against society as found is a confession of the artificiality 



SOCIAL BLOOD-TAINTS 69 

of the struggle. To warp man over to something that 
he accepts in public, but denies in private has always been 
foredoomed to failure ; and the innate hypocrisy and de- 
ceit of society persists largely because man will continue 
to try every political theory within reach, excepting always 
one: To cure man of his morbid tastes (if such is your 
proud hope), start in and tell the truth about yourself. 
Begin with your own drunkenness, your seductions, your 
numerous types of selfishness, your vulgar ambitions, your 
petty thieving, and the various social masks you assume, 
to cover your face, and still hold your position in society. 
Be exceedingly candid; come forward with all necessary 
and intimate details ; and in due time, piecing all together, 
rest assured some social genius will find the remedy for 
the morbid growths, even as scientists by studying the 
likes and dislikes of cellforms in the human body, 
finally hit on specific antitoxins for old and baffling dis- 
eases. 

If If in medicine, why not also in society? 
^ Here is what we should do : History, for years to come, 
till mankind is awakened from stupid dreams of imagi- 
nary perfection amidst a world of bitterness and strife, 
should cease being a fairy-tale to flatter us into delight 
over our individual, civic or national virtues. Instead, 
let the strong man come forth with his methods of the 
dissecting room, this new Doctor of Social History; and 
let him proceed now without further delay fearlessly to 
inform his students of social blood taints and social mor- 
bid growths. 

Too long have we looked only at the rouged lips, the 
false hair, the velvet gowns, the ermine robes, the dia- 
mond tieras, while in God's name starvation, misery, hy- 
pocrisy and fraud have been supported in high places. 
ff We see no real social enlightenment possible, for this 



70 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

Earth, unless our breed of animals with the pen drop 
their rose-water ink-pots, and seize the surgeon's knife: 
for too much flattery has been the spoil of us these many 
years gone by. 

At least then we will know what to expect of human 
beings. We do not hope to transform man into something 
more than man: that were foolish and vain. But man 
could at least look at his own picture and make up his 
mind if he is satisfied. 

§ § § 

|[ Yes indeed, thank God ! the bayonet may still be trusted 
in British hands, or in German or in American, French, 
or Russian, and its use described by our kept-historians 
as "chiefly moral." 

Surely we are not exasperating enough to expect humans 
to cease to be humans, in order to demonstrate that this 
or that political party should rule the hour ? 
|[ The children of Montrose were unable to read because 
of long hours in the cotton mills, but to-day tho our 
generation boasts that it can read in seven languages, 
our culture has not robbed us of our National Museum 
(Smithsonian), where in one of the largest sections are 
displayed hundreds of types of guns, pistols, swords, 
daggers, and other weapons of slaughter, showing the 
vast amount of thought the human animal has devoted 
to murder, at wholesale, and that too in times peculiarly 
exploited as the forward march of progress, as against 
the cruder methods man used in the days of the flint-lock. 

§ § § 

If Let us be reasonable. 

Could the ancient and honorable tribe of weavers and 
spinners return to this Earth, on a brief tour of observa- 
tion, this would be their report : 
]f In the days of the Pharaohs, the shroud we so labor- 



STILL ARE YE NAKED 71 

lously wove from flax with spindle and distaff, winds 
the shepherd and king, ahke. 

II In the far times of Homer, long, long before the Age 
of Machinery was dreamed of, still our women use the 
crude methods of spindle and distaff, and still the shroud 
covers the faults and frailties of human clay. 
H In Solomon's day, as Holy Writ proclaims, her busy 
hands hold the distaff and the cloth wraps mortal dust, 
whether for court ball or for the tomb. 
fl Likewise, in our own glorious time, even to a period as 
recent as the Battle of Waterloo, the old-fashioned spmdle 
and distaff remains man's main support to protect his 
body from the winter's storms, or to fashion the purple 
of kings for avarice and pride. n- • , • j 

Then comes the Age of Machinery and the distaff is laid 
away for the spinning-frame ; first run by water-power, 
then by steam, to-day by electricity ; and with power in- 
creased ten-millionfold ball-room gowns of choicest fab- 
rics, in wondrous art-patterns, are now fabricated with 
lightning-like rapidity for this proud generation; sup- 
porting our ancient pride of position by woven gee-gaw ; 
but still likewise do we need the plain white shroud 
worn by the Mummy, four thousand years ago. 
^ Now tell me, pray, in what respect, whether in the far 
off Age of the Distaff or in the present Age of Machin- 
ery, man has ceased to be man? 

Whether Richard the Lion still chases the pagans on the 
sacred soil of Palestine, or whether a modern states- 
man with feet of clay, (speaking for the United States, 
for England, France, or Germany), calls on High Heaven 
to testify to the justice of "our" cause, as against all other 
causes whatsoever, wherein does the story differ, wherein 
is the tale new? 
TJ Is there other, and if there is what does it record? 



72 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

jf There always was and always will be places on this 
Earth wherein the inhabitants set their dogs on any 
stranger whose curiosity leads him to visit them; and 
they may even be American dogs at that. 
Nay, nay, do not frown; calmly face the fact. Before 
you put on your make-up to go out on the street, it will 
do you no harm to take a look at yourself in the glass. 
^ Plagues sweep over European battlefields, half the 
population perishes ; war desolates Belgium or Serbia ; 
fields are tilled or untilled; crops ripen or crops rot; — 
what does it all mean, or does it mean anything, and what 
about it? 

Do you not see that man has a dual, nay a many-sided 
nature, and with equal joy now loves, now fights, now 
prays ? 

He is not inconsistent in this. He is very human, in- 
deed. 

And while to the casual eye it seems as tho for the time 
being Death confers a monopoly on all human thought, 
at the same time to offset, this Parliament or that Con- 
gress solemnly pass resolutions declaring that there "shall 
be" no more wars, and the churchmen proceed to raise 
great funds for the erection of imposing new steeples ; — 
and mankind, weary of war, now unites in psalm-singing 
and in uplifting monuments to God. 
Tf Enee, meenie, minee, mo — what do you make out of it ? 

§ § § 

^ As long as man is man, these three things will he do : 
Fight, love and worship. And these, then, are his 
supreme occupations, "what" he regards as most im- 
portant, taking him at his own private reckoning. 
In this regard, ten thousand years see him still hunt his 
food, seek the woman always, and look for a sign in the 
skies. 



MEN'S LITTLE WAYS 73 

All reactions, all protests, all new knowledge find him in 
three particulars unchanged ; and if these three do not 
limit man's progress at least they define clearly his nature. 
He must fight because to struggle is the universal law of 
life ; he must love because sex attraction is the strongest 
stimulus known to man, turning him from one labor to 
another, one revenge to another, one cruelty to another, 
one sacrifice to another, one mercy to another, sounding 
the heights and depths of life, from brutal murders to 
spiritual aspirations, all in the name of love; and finally, 
man must seek his sign in the skies, because man is essen- 
tially a religious animal and if he cannot worship a god 
will worship gold, or power, or woman's beauty — or will 
worship himself. 

§ § § 

If What then is this thing called national history, as re- 
vealed by the human kaleidoscope ? From age to age, its 
aspects vary as we change our point of observation, but 
on close examination we find that it is always stufifed 
with the identical bits of colored glass — that at one mo- 
ment make the pretty cross, at the next the devil's tripod. 



XI 

ALL MEN AT HEART TYRANTS 

^ Tyranny is a natural characteristic of mankind, 
likewise love, likezvise hate: and few men pass 
thru the years without abusing love or hate: also, 
it is well to remember that, in spite of the flatter- 
ies of history-mongers Nations are but crowds 
of men, exercising freely, tho under cover, all 
the faults, frailties and obsessions of the human 
animal. . . . 

ly Man is so constituted that he is able to justify his con- 
duct, always, whether it be a coronation or a crucifixion. 
The singular fact is that men, like nations, at times endure 
with extreme patience conditions that seem well-nigh 
intolerable; insults are passed over lightly, while deep 
wrongs go unavenged ; or upon frivolous pretexts or, in- 
deed, for no adequate reason, men or nations plunge head- 
long into war. 

If There comes the inevitable day when, taking affairs 
into his own hands, man's parchments lettered with 
"whereas" this and ''whereas" that, signed, sealed and 
delivered with solemn forms, become so much chafif to 
be blown away by the first wind. 

His recorded idealisms of brotherhood gives way to an 
obsession to kill. Later, the demon of war dies in his 
breast and once more he turns his solemn gaze in the 

74 



MILK OR LIQUOR? 75 

direction of the Promised Land, in which the peoples of 
this earth are to be united in the bonds of hberty, equahty 
and fraternity. 

II In considering now what is commonly called National 
History, as recorded for the delectation of all, let us not 
be befogged ; but let us hold ever before us the image of 
men and their little ways. 

Thus, we will not go far adrift, nor will be troubled too 
much in a vain quest for "reasons" why certain events 
turned this way or that, at a given moment, then swung 
back again as time passed away. 

Real history, if it ever is written, must be bulwarked 
upon human nature; the ruling passion at a given mo- 
ment: whether the national stomach craved milk or 
liquor; how the people felt; what this people re- 
garded as important ; what went on in their heads, or 
what was wrong with the national liver ; whether scowl- 
ing or joyous, sulky or frivolous; what, in short, the 
people felt like doing, whether to sing and pray, or to 
drink alcohol till frenzied to kill. 

Regardless of their parchments and their constitutions, 
what did they hold essential, and how did they proceed 
— these are some of the questions. 

^ A Nation's physical and psychical fibres are precisely 
like your own physical and psychical fibres; and even 
as you, no matter what your conduct^ proceed to set your- 
self in the most reasonable light to your own proper 
justification and to save your pride, likewise with na- 
tions whatever is put in operation whether of benevolence 
or greed is always to be taken for granted. 
Treaties are made and unmade — do you wish examples? 
Laws are solemnly recorded to be upheld or broken, as 
the spirit moves — do you question this? Study your 
newspapers for a week. 



76 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

Prayers are uttered — to bolster up one side or the otner 
side. Do you doubt that God was on the side of the North, 
because Grant had the better Commissary Department, 
and not on the side of the South, because Lee's army 
was starving? 

§ § § 

^ To lay the axe at once at the root : tyranny is a natural 
characteristic of mankind, likewise love, likewise hate, 
and few men pass through the years without abusing love 
or hate ; also, it is well to remember that nations are but 
men, multiplied by thousands. 

The survey shows the imperfection of life or the possi- 
bility of the perfectability of life, as you will, but it 
shows primarily men's ways. 

]f There is no science about it. Possibly there may be 
such a thing as a scientific method in endeavoring to 
gather up the "materials" of history (or for that matter 
forty-odd scientific methods), but as for the "thing in 
itself," this thing called History, or historical writing, 
disguise the fact as you will, it does indeed attempt to 
deal harmoniously with confusion, riot, carnival, comedy, 
tragedy — as you like it. 

][ Volumes have been written to prove just "why" we 
defeated Great Britain in Colonial days, but the real 
reason is because we desired so to do and hated hard 
enough and were strong enough and fortunate enough 
to bring our wish about. We stole, or annexed, or pur- 
chased — as you will — California from Mexico because 
we had the opportunity, nay made the opportunity and 
were glad of the opportunity ; and if one day the United 
States flag floats from the North to the South Pole it 
will be because that is our ambitious wish as a nation, and 
not because we find justification in this or that docu- 
ment in the archives. 



"REASONS'* 



77 



tf You see, man is always able to set forth his "reasons," 
whether for a coronation or a crucifixion. 
He justifies his conduct by making up his mind, this way 
or that way ; and making up one's mind, with a nation as 
with an individual, is indeed a simple matter. By ignor- 
ing one line of facts and laying emphasis on another line 
of facts, presto the thing is done. 



XII 

THE PROFOUND FALLACY 

^ That Nations exist to do good to mankind is 
easily proven: all that is required is for you to 
close your eyes and accept as inspired what is 
termed the Nation's history. . . . 

If Well, the historians of the after-years survey the situ- 
ation, as nearly as may be, and in due course bring forth 
this or that parchment, this or that treaty, this or that 
law ; and we are gravely informed that what the Nation 
did at that particular moment was "right." 
Ponderous volumes are then written to prove whatever 
has been set up ; whereas, all this trouble might be saved 
if we looked upon history as indeed the record of men 
and their little ways, that is to say human nature, in 
action. 

If Was the so-called annexation of Texas right or wrong? 
Was the war with Mexico, in the '40's, right or wrong? 
Was the construction of the German Empire right or 
wrong? Was the up-building of the British Empire, 
with its long record of protectorates, seizures, spoilations 
of war, and reprisals, right or wrong? 
If Who knows ? 

if These situations, and hundreds more, freight the shelves 
with book after book, and our National pride is increased 

78 



HISTORICAL BEAUTY-DOCTOR 79 

when we read that we are "justified," and our conduct 
is "right." 

If The plain fact is that, whenever possible, men will do 
what they like — nations likewise. 

At one time we overflow with love and affection, at an- 
other unbridled hate runs away with us ; and as no human 
being is consistent, neither is any nation consistent. 
And, on the whole, there is no reason why a nation should 
be consistent. 

A hundred and one considerations of policy, law, order 
are swept away in an instant, in your own life, and you 
fight. 

Later, you sit down to a game of chess, wondering how 
you could have been concerned about a trifle. Consider 
well your own private history and do not spare your- 
self. 

Do not try to walk on stilts ; yes, for once come down to 
earth where you belong. 

j[ Why then make a demi-god of a nation, in historical 
writings, protesting that the National course is based on 
high ideology ? 

The queer thing about it is that nobody is deceived, 
altho all must pretend to be deceived. 

§ . § § 

jf What peculiar psychological something is gratified when 
Society tricks herself out in feathers and gee-gaws and 
stands looking at herself in the historical beauty-doctor's 
mirror? To be told that the disfiguring mole is gone, 
that the white hair still retains its gloss and sleekness, 
that the hollow cheeks have been rounded, the crow's- 
marks ironed out — reply O stars, on what it all means. 
If The great saints are carved out of the greatest sin- 
ners ; and it is not improbable that our finest epics on 
repentance, brotherly love and international disarmament, 



8o THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

expressed in Hague peace-reports, will spring from the 
lips of National leaders who in war did wholesale mur- 
der, by machinery. 

Once our brutal obsessions are gone, we are, as individ- 
uals or as nations, the noblest of our kind ; and the great 
War of 1914 will, as a matter of fact, be followed by 
unprecedented church-building and an era of poetizing 
on the virtues of brotherhood. 

The higher you rise, the harder you fall; likewise the 
higher the spiritual rebound, after brutal passion is spent. 
And no man is more repentant or sees more clearly his 
duty to his fellow-man than he who the day before 
turned himself into a maniac with wine. 
If The De Profundus of nations, recording abstract senti- 
ments of brotherly love, will usually be found to be neither 
more nor less than cause and effect ; — vivid allegations of 
marvelous future good, originating in deep past wrongs. 
We see nothing improper in this, nor do we set it up here 
as a defect. Men will be men, so why conceal the fact 
longer ? 

jf Fighting, loving, praying ; everything by turn and noth- 
ing long ; from demi-god to imbecile ; from rattle-box to 
prayer-book and beads ; such is that glory and that jest, 
man. 

. § § § 

If On that day of universal acknowledgment, men will no 
longer care to befool either themselves or their fellow- 
kind, by setting up mock-heroics. 

A new type of history, far more honest than any that has 
yet appeared, will then be ushered in, for men as well 
as for nations. 

The new type of record, based on the stark realism of 
human nature, will save worlds of ink and paper — to 
say nothing of the eyesight of historians. It will also 



THE ARMY CHAPLAIN 8i 

help us to go forward if that is what we wish ; because 
then we will no longer deceive ourselves numbering our 
spurious virtues. 

To-day, under the microscopic methods in vogue, history- 
mongers are forced to turn the pages of innumerable 
parchments, dust-laden and obsolete. 
These fatiguing investigations are premised on the pro- 
found fallacy that nations are consistent, and that nations 
are twice alike. 

Were this a fact, the card-index system of writing history 
were indeed correct. 

To know the "facts" is at all times essential, but to make 
yourself believe that you will find somewhere, embalmed 
in law and parchment, in treaties, in speeches, in I know 
not what, ultimate reasons "why" this or that nation 
did this or that at a precise moment in its history, is to 
say that you know all about the moons of Jupiter — if 
indeed Jupiter has moons. 
j[ History is human nature, in action. 

§ § § 

^ For a thousand years, men have endeavored by self- 
flatteries to link their lives with the gods. For this, the 
breed of historians is largely responsible; every Nation 
has its chaplains to offer prayers before the battle, ex- 
pressing the mystic belief that God is on "our" side. 
]f And regardless of man's proud brag of passing still 
another life on a distant star, man reserves for himself 
in this life the use of the fagots and the lash. 
T[ Despite this lapse, man is always able in "history" to 
leap the gulf between promise and performance, between 
spiritual anxieties as to the state of his soul and his 
"practical" every-day interests. 

If Never forget that what man consistently continues to 
do, in spite of all the high brag of the historians, is to 



82 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

go on loving, go on hating, go on eating, go on fighting, 
and go on praying. 

jf He is not inconsistent in doing these opposed things. 
jf He is merely acting like a human being, 
jf And this will be the theme, as worked out one day in 
the newer, truer type of history, the only true history 
helping us forward. 

If Perhaps you do not like it, but what's the odds ? 
jj How very dull this world would be if all men were of 
identical opinions, and bayed to the moon the same 
hymns. 

j[As one of the immediate results of the great War of 
1914, it has been stuck under our noses that many of 
our smug human pretenses will have to be revalued, 
marked down a bit ; yes, in many cases even put on the 
bargain counter. It was no doubt a great moral shock, 
but in the end it will do us good, like the sudden plunge 
in cold water, before breakfast. 

Many of our historical pretenses are now seen to have 
been based on pure cant; also, that our historical high 
brag went too far ahead of our morals. 
In the past, we always pictured ourselves as we wished, 
and obliging historians have, like industrious photograph- 
ers, retouched the National negative till it was reduced 
to a lovely putty-like smoothness, with all the human 
wrinkles eradicated. 

Men for years had been saying, "All's well with the world, 
all problems settled, brotherhood around the corner." 
And men made themselves victims to this absurd his- 
torical method of retouching. 

TI These "p's" are always in order in "history" : Pompos- 
ity, Pretense, Passion, Prejudice. 

Now add Prunes and Prisms and you have the circle 
complete. 



"LEST WE FORGET!" 83 

^Also "history" often turns out to depend on whether 
you are shouting for your side or are booing the enemy. 
The British mob goes crazy over the Kaiser, but might 
just as well turn loony over the French, if saj, wind was 
still blowing the way it blew in 1900, when Parisian 
journalists fairly burst blood-vessels in literary excite- 
ments over the British attitude in the Boer war. 
jf Ene, meenie, minie, mo — well, what about it ? 
Nothing only this : that the human animal likes to retouch 
his picture to flatter his National pride : and we in Amer- 
ica have done the same, even as has the Teuton, the 
Frenchman and the Russian, 

It's all very human but it's all very unhistorical, else we 
must get a new name for "history." 
Do we really mean to go on believing that "history" is 
an aggregation of boosters, intent on high brag, far ahead 
of our morals? 
Ene, meenie, minie, mo, it may well be. Who knows. 

§ § § 

^ We dislike to be forced to add that of late years the 

"great" National historian is usually president of some 

arson-gang. He makes a business of burning National 

ideals that are not "his" Nation's ideals. 

For example, under the war spirit of 191 5, Kipling noisily 

harangued anybody who would listen, avowing: That 

the Germans would rape the women of the Island, if the 

opportunity came, and that, anyway, the Germans were 

cowards. Now, pray "what" is history ? 

For this, he is often given gold medals, and his name is 

taught to the schoolchildren. 

He is regarded as a "great" man. 

^ In times of peace the kept-historian, beginning in the 
cellar of the Congressional library, literally reads his way 



84 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

to the garret, informing himself on all the "authorities" on 
his topic; what every living and dead scribbler babbled 
and cackled on the subject. By some extraordinary feat 
of brute strength, he pieces these together for the edifi- 
cation of his fellow countrymen. 

If The work often takes years and is known as "monu- 
mental." It is like the Pyramids. Those who come after 
marvel at the gigantic labors involved but wonder what 
'twas all about, or why it came into being. 
^ One fact, however, is always clear ; the ways of mere 
human animals have no place in his "history." There is 
everything in it, except men and their little ways. 
The Patriot is represented as sitting on a far-off rock, 
sighing for his Country, but he has ceased to be a human 
being. He is now a demi-god. 

It is said, with solemnity, that at the battle of Monmouth, 
Washington used the word "Damn"! but the historian 
that recorded this very human lapse was promptly be- 
headed. This seems to be the only place in thousands of 
pages where Washington acts like a human being. 

§ § § 

^ The great war has forced us to revalue many facts we 
supposed were settled, and one is our dehumanized 
methods of writing "history." 

^ The idea that mere man has anything to do with "his- 
tory" never entered the heads of old-line historians ; man 
with all his vices and his feeble virtues ; man the political 
liar, thief and visionary ; man the opportunist ; man who 
poses as more than he is, but who crawls on his belly to 
the temple in order to be known as a "nominal" Christ- 
ian? 

If Why not use these well known situations ? 
ij Because these things are too uncomfortable. What 
we want is the "uplift," even if we have to censor the 



HAVOC AMONG THIEVES 85 

news to such an extent that we teach our children Hes. 
If Hence it is a favorite practice to present man as the 
"unconscious" instrument in the hands of the Almighty, 
carrying out the Almighty's plans. 

^ No matter "what" man does, he is marching forward. 
He may be going sidewise or backwards, but he is his- 
torically going forward. 

^ And, of course, he is impelled by the highest altruistic 
ideas in all his wars, historians tell us. And certainly a 
kept-historian ought to know what he is talking about. 
j[ Did it ever occur to you how one-sided all this histori- 
cal glorification of Man really is? We read worlds about 
what Man thinks of himself, and what Man thinks of 
Nature ; but would it not he a relief to be able to read — 
just for once! — a book showing exactly what Nature 
thinks of Man? 

If Man's idea of "history" is to write something to flatter 
his pride, sound his brag or boost his boast. Since the 
beginning we have been doing that very thing. 
^ If he burns Joan at the stake, in one generation, and 
in the next has her canonized as a saint, he is not acting 
as an inconsistent human beast who not long ago crawled 
on all fours but now walks upright. Not at all, instead, 
he is exhibiting the "mysterious ways of history," whose 
final revelation is of a destiny on some distant star. 

§ § § 

^ Man dearly loves to present himself as a superior cre- 
ation, vastly more knowing than the frog or the zebra; 
and if you ask him he will tell you so, himself. 
j[ His historians spend years in spinning their intellectual 
cobwebs to prove that all's well with this earth, only to 
find that man is man, and that he loves, hates, fights and 
prays, as the fancy moves just as he always did, all the 
historians of this earth notwithstanding. 



86 ' THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

jf All that the old-line historians ask us to do is this : 

Close our eyes to coronations succeeded by crucifixions, 

and remember that man is a superior being, but do not 

judge him by his acts. 

If It is not "historical" to judge a man by what he does ; 

the thing is to judge him by what he says in his books 

on religion, morals, politics, and in the editorial page of 

your favorite newspaper. 

If At least, therein you will find (manufactured) man's 

higher destiny. 

§ § § 

If There is a vast amount of "history" that leads to down- 
right ignorance and should be rightly excluded from 
library shelves: is it not time that some new method be 
used, wherein man can glimpse himself somewhat as he 
is? The great war has forced us to recognize many 
shams and pretensions, especially in old-time historical 
methods. 

In the new type of history, based on human nature, man 
will be depicted as man, with all man's faults and (pos- 
sibly) a few of his virtues. 

If You feel the morning breeze of the new time, wherein 
a man does not need to cease to be a human being in 
order either to make or to understand "history." 
If The idea that history should ever be written in terms 
of vice and virtue, instead of cant and piffle. National 
brag and quack — how shocking to the conventional lies 
of society! 

"How very weak the very wise, 
How very small the very great " 

If And still the new type of biographical writing does not 
necessarily mean a cynic's book, nor yet a disillusion. It 



THE HUMAN ANIMAL 87 

is history in human terms, in the way of man's Hfe as 
expressed in vice with an occasional ghmpse of a fleeting 
virtue. 

^ And having done with vile flatteries based on enormous 
egotisms, at last this race will be in a position to go for- 
ward : for we will gull ourselves no longer as to "what" 
we represent. 



XIII 

ALL LIFE A BATTLE 

1[ Under Nature's inexorable decree, this the 
price we pay for bread, or bone or breath: that 
fight we must from sleep to sleep, else we do not 
survive: whether zve face the fact manfully and 
call it War, or instead monger in meanings till 
murder masquerades as morality. . . . 

f The air at this moment is filled with war and rumors 
of war. One hundred years ago it was the same; and 
one hundred years hence it will be the same. 
tfWhy? 

jf War is usually limited to battleships and bayonets, but 
the everyday struggle of existence means war. 
Any man who has hunted in the mountains or fished in 
the sea will tell you that ; any dog knows that his whole 
life is spent in endeavoring to keep away starvation ; and 
in order to live, other forms of life must perish. 
The greatest "pacifist" kills hundreds of animal-forms 
each year, and as for militarism, there are intimate types 
of militarism that are associated with the very hopes of 
your own heart. 

^ Nay, do not start back in indignation. 
The struggle of life means war often to death ; it is merely 
incidental whether that scene calls for the loud qrack 

88 



FIGHTING, LOVING, PRAYING 89 

of a revolver, cr the wicked glance of a coquette in a 

crowded ball room. 

^The trouble is, man is always fooling himself with 

soft words, just as he is always going to the historical 

beauty-doctor, and as he is always looking around for 

some fortune-teller to uphold him. 

He wishes to be told that all is well with his life. 

^ Great masses of the population pass part of their time 

in giving advice, assuring the doubting ones that all is 

as it should be. 

Men who make a religion of hope and good cheer, often 

attribute to optimism the consolations of a superior faith. 

§ § § 
^ Men go about crying, "Peace I peace 1" But there is 
no peace, nor can there be peace ; nor is there any good 
reason why there should be peace. 
There never has been a time on this earth when there 
was peace, and there is none now. 

"How small, of all that human hearts endure. 
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure !" 
^ Men fight, instinctively ; and may the day never come 
when they will lose their fighting edge. 
They fight, and they love and they pray. 
Love is a battle, and the hunt for food is a battle, and 
existence itself is a struggle, from the cradle to the 
grave. 

Men must, then, give thrust for thrust. 
^The infant struggling toward the light, opens its eyes 
upon a world of disorder. 

Did the infant reason, already in Its first feeble moments 
it would know that to battle is the decree of survival. 
A hundred forces are intent on destroying ; and any par- 
ent well knows the anxieties of the first year, in rearing 
the child. 



90 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

II The school boy, too, must do battle. On the play- 
grounds, as well as in the classes, the lad first learns the 
inequahties of life, finds that his mates cannot always 
be depended upon to play on the square. 
Even to-day, a member of the team is plotting to lose 
the annual foot-ball game. This fellow, secretly con- 
spiring to be made captain, failing in his ambition, de- 
cides on reprisals that will break up the club. 
j[The young man dreams of what he misnames love, 
that is to say the dawning of the instinct of self-preser- 
vation. Impelled by sex-instinct, he starts out on a new 
kind of war, that is to say he seeks out or hunts out, as 
you please, his young companion. 

He is attracted by her youth, her beauty and her warm 
red lips. 

At night, they go down to the grove and caress under the 
light of the moon. The struggle is on, and if she yields 
to his embraces innocently and, as they say, makes a 
mistake, poor girl, the war against her by Society later 
forces her to throw her baby into the. river; it may even 
be thru the ice in the dead of winter at that ; yes, do that 
very thing, even in this city of a thousand steeples. 
^ Her life, henceforth, is a prolonged battle with un- 
friendly social elements around her. You may not call 
it war, but it is war. Call it what you please ! She now 
has a bitter taste of men and their little ways. 

§ § .§ 

^But we will take the other side, and we will say that 

she is what is called honorably married to the man she 

adores. For this rich young man's favor, did she not 

have to outdo the other ambitious young women of her 

set? 

If Wearing paint, feathers and beads, like a savage, she 

calls it dressing in style. The day comes when she glories 



DICING WITH DESTINY 91 

in the defeat of her rival. Her Hps curl in scorn, her 
heart beats high with satisfaction. She has gained her 
object, that is to say, she has repulsed the other young 
woman in the competitions of love. Yet, each is called 
a moral young woman of the period. In what strange 
ways men use words, is it not true? 

§ § § . 

j[ Years roll on, and the former frivolous young woman 
is now a sober-minded matron, with children growing 
up around her. She engages in a new kind of struggle. 
Indeed, it comes upon her at unawares, for she never 
imagined herself the centre of such a conflict. But soon 
or late, it comes. 

If She now plans social successes for her children, sends 
them to the best schools, instructs them against what 
she calls the wiles of the world. 

Her heart often fails her as her son is away late at night 
with boisterous companions. 

What's to become of her son, what of her daughter? If 
this is not war in the mother's heart, then words have no 
meaning. 

If Well, time passes. Her son becomes a victim to drink ; 
war again to save his life ; or her daughter, now entering 
upon the frivolous age, refuses to go to church. Thus 
the war goes on and on, year after year. This incessant 
battling wears her life away. 

TJ Old age creeps on apace. Now begins a final long 
struggle with disease. Day by day, she finds her strength 
failing. Little by little, there is an imperceptible physi- 
cal and mental loss, and she comes nearer the inevitable 
end that awaits all mortals. 

She recalls the state of her soul. She suddenly realizes 
that there are a hundred obligations that in time gone 
by she neglected — neglect of her parents — of her friends 



92 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 



if her church — neglect of the poor and neglect of the 
plain duties of passing years. 

She makes a last, lone fight to get right with her God. 
What a struggle this is, to be sure. It racks the inmost 
fibres of her being. 

Her former ambitions in the main now seem absurd, her 
former attempts to outdo others, her vanity of dress, the 
wasted hours — war is upon her, a last long terrifying 
war. She wishes she had lived otherwise ! 

§ § § 

^ Well, the rain and the wind and the frost beat down 
and proceed to make war on man's last resting place. The 
supposedly imperishable granite marker on his grave, if 
closely examined after twenty years, is now found to 
be crumbling ; year by year, the chinks made by the frost 
are deepened by the persistent polishing of flying dust. 
And each winter the minute crevices fill with snow-water, 
the frost comes, then the thaw, and the subtle forces of 
nature crack the stone. 

In the end, the very mound sinks more and more until 
it is again level with the sod. 

Thus, in ceaseless but imperceptible warfare of Nature, 
all trace of the slim little mound under which repose 
our bones is obliterated. Not even that spot is secure 
from inevitable change. War even here ! 

§ § § 

jf Under Nature's inexorable decree, we must fight — 
whether we call it war or by some milder term. Peace 
can be gained only through war, whether it is the peace 
of National honor and security, bulwarked by rifles and 
dreadnaughts, or whether it is the peace that passeth 
understanding, in your immortal soul, when you have 
squared your black life with your fellow-man, before 
Death strikes you down. 



HONORS OF WAR 93 

^And, after all, is not a soldier who on the field of 
battle levels a rifle at your heart, more honorable than 
the cowardly stay-at-home devil, who by his secret scan- 
dalous words, blasts a woman's reputation, it may even be 
forcing her to throw her babe into the river. 
j[ Come, what do you think ? Why not, then, a new, a 
more honest and helpful way of writing history instead 
of longer continuing the old-line mush-gush? 



XIV 

WHY WAR PERSISTS 

j[ Even to-day in your petty life you are forcing 
your advantages, making your private wars for 
self or pozuer, seducing your women, lying, 
stealing, counting your gains, indulging your 
appetites, building your great castle on the hill, 
forcing your rivals to capitulate; and, on the 
whole, are conducting yourself to advance your 
ozvn ascendancy. History is the record of 
human nature, in action, otherwise the struggle 
for existence — war! 

jf Everywhere, we behold the exertions of man, individ- 
ually, to sustain himself against his rival, be that rival 
a firm, a corporation, a political party, or a state. 
And when he finds conditions not to his liking, he sets 
about it to change them, that they may be to his liking. 
His attitude he justifies in various ways ; for example, 
that what he is doing is for the good of others. 
j[ Washington, great patriot, found it advisable to align 
himself against the Government at the time in power; 
hence, we cannot even set up the fiction that patriotism 
is the ardent support of your own Government, at all 
times ; for here is a distinguished man who achieved im- 
mortal renown by denouncing his own Government for 
a new Government based on political rebellion against the 
powers that were. 

94 



PATRIOTISM 95 

However, had he been unsuccessful, there is no question 
that he would have been shot as a British traitor. 
Had British arms been able to overcome our Fathers, 
signers of our own Declaration of Independence would 
have met merciless fate at the hands of British officialism, 
even as (1916) Irish leaders who fought the identical 
British foe, for our own identical reasons, perished 
martyrs to liberty. 

If Well, what do you make out of words, then, for ex- 
ample such words as patriotism and war? 
They borrow wholly as much from the character of the 
strife waged, and from the character of the leader. We 
are prone to look to the ultimate utility of a contest for 
its justification rather than defend the brute fact of the 
war in itself. 

Therefore, be not surprised to learn that in the struggle 
for existence man, in his individual capacity, will lie and 
steal for advantage ; yet the fiction is set up that Nations — 
which are after all is said but aggregations of men — 
exist to do good to the world. 

We repeat, Nations will lie and steal ; and there is no 
reason why we should be surprised. Why expect other- 
wise? 

^ The nature of the human animal is such that he will 
not yield his bone without a battle, and will in turn, when- 
ever possible, take the bone from the other dog. 
The politico-religious romance of the French Revolution, 
with its dreams of liberty, fraternity and equality were 
succeeded in short space by the iron hand of Napoleon, 
who found France a Republic and left it an Autocracy. 
^ Here in these United States we have long been wont 
to make our high historical brag of National solidarity, 
as against the world ; but when the day comes that a 
man of consummate selfishness, executive and military 



96 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

power sees his advantage, on that day a new history of 
these United States begins. 

j[ You say that certain great poHtico-social facts are for- 
ever settled. You are in gross error. 
Nothing is settled as long as there are two men and 
one woman on this earth, or two women and one man. 

§ § § 

If National boundaries will change and change again ; 
creeds rise and fall, parties come and go, wealth be 
heaped up here or there only to be scattered far and 
wide. 

In each generation, in the struggle of the human animal 
for supremacy, a new Caesar storms the walls and sacks 
the city, which falls under the new supreme will. 
A thousand times history informs us, soberly, that we 
have entered upon the Golden Age — but women continue 
to be seduced, children cry for bread, widows robbed, 
and fire and sword scourge the land. 
We are disciples of "new" dogmas for age to age ; again 
and again, we proclaim that in the future we see only 
good; and we throw out banners to the breeze and cry 
in the market-place, "At last we are done with wronging 
our brother!" We support the "new" dogmas with our 
very life's blood; we die on the battlefield in a species 
of delirium. The day of humanity, tolerance and liberty, 
will sweep away the old order of error, folly and pre- 
judice. 
^ For the time being, doubt has no place in our minds. 

§ § § 

^ When, for example, we read the "Rights of Man," as 
adopted by the Assembly, Aug. 26, 1789, in the first ex- 
citement of the French Revolution, we wonder that ideas 
so simple should have required the baptism Qf blood from 
lives by the tens of thousands. 



NECKS OF THE PROSTRATE 97 

fl'"Men," it is affirmed, "are born and remain free and 
equal in rights. The aim of all political association is the 
preservation of the natural and imprescribable Rights 
of Man. 

^ "Those rights are liberty, property, security, and resist- 
ance to opposition. Liberty consists in the freedom to 
do everything which injures no one else ; hence, the nat- 
ural rights of each man has no limits except those which 
assure to the other members of the society the enjoyments 
of equal rights. These limits can be determined best by 
law." 

§ § § 

II What is there about all this that is not commonplace, 
dull, ordinary? Yet it was not to be attained without 
oceans of blood. 

jf Let us continue, more specifically. 
jf "No person shall be accused, arrested or imprisoned 
except in accordance with the forms of law. . . . The 
law shall provide such punishments as are strictly and 
obviously necessary. . . . No one shall be disquieted on 
account of his opinions, including his religious views, and 
the freedom of communication of ideas and opinions is 
one of the most precious of the rights of man. Each 
citizen may, accordingly, write, speak, and print with 
freedom. . . . All the citizens have a right to decide, 
either personally or through their representatives, as to 
the necessity for taxes, and to know to what use these 
taxes are put. ..." 

If What is there about all this that, were men reasonable, 
might not have been settled by common consent ? 
j[ Yet within ten years, that is to say November, 1799, 
when the Directory was overthrown, and Napoleon be- 
come Consul, there was little left to bear official witness 
to the Republic of "Equality !" 



98 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

If Do not blame Napoleon. What he saw was an "opening" 
for a man of talents : and "opportunity" he conceived to 
be the basis of all properly constituted social order. 
We have long made our brag of this Republic, "which is 
opportunity !" 

If Napoleon regarded the philosophical dreams of Rosseau 
as those of a madman. Napoleon did not hold for one 
moment that the rallying cry "Liberty ! Fraternity ! Equal- 
ity !" offered a practical basis for reconstructing society. 
If After the turmoil and insecurity of the Revolution, 
there came an inherent yearning for stability and reas- 
surance. 

If "We must have eyes for what is practicable and real, 
in the application of principles, and not for the specula- 
tive and hypothetical," Napoleon solemnly declared, at 
one of the earlier sessions to his Council of State. 
If And for the sake of France — such was his plea — he jus- 
tified all his boundless cruelties. 

If He set up the fiction that "all" he did was for "her 
good." 

If He did not regret the excesses of the Revolution : the 
situation offered for a man of talent "a golden oppor- 
tunity." 

If And you would do the same if you were strong 
enough ! 

IfEven to-day in your petty life you are forcing your 
advantages, making your private wars for self or power, 
seducing your women, lying, stealing, counting your 
gains, indulging your appetites, building your great castle 
on the hill, forcing your rivals to capitulate ; and on the 
whole, are conducting yourself to advance your own as- 
cendancy. 

If History is the record of human nature, in action. In 
other words, it is the struggle for existence — war! 



XV 

WHAT O'CLOCK WITH THE WORLD? 

^ Deceive yourself no longer . . , in our hypoc- 
risies of history zve are prone to represent that 
men's ways are to he transformed by so simple a 
spectacle as Six Joint High Commissioners, in 
black robes, seated in solemn conclave at the 
Hague . . . surrounded by mounds of books 
and papers . . . interpreting what henceforth 
shall be the political as well as the psychological 
basis of life. 

If But let us go into this thing with open eyes : not prom- 
ising ourselves too much. 

That our natural rivalries and animosities, making us 
love or hate or worship will be less manifest under Six 
High Commissioners in black robes, or green, or blue, or 
in all colors of the rainbow ; or that the Six High Com- 
missioners will be able by some new form of political 
or moral hypnotism to banish War . . as well say that 
you would consent to arbitrate an insult to your wife or 
child. 

^ Man wishes always to screen his real nature behind 
scrolls, parchments and enactments of various kinds, duly 
signed, sealed and delivered. 

He will always tell you that he goes into the slums of 
the world with his armies and his protectorates, in order 

99 



100 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

to do good to the world ; but it is, for example, question- 
able whether Britain would be in the Transvaal at this 
hour were the land a desert, and no diamond mines or 
gold-reefs there. . . . What think you? 
Nay, do not disturb your tranquility; we have no wish 
to bring up controversial subjects : if you dislike the illus- 
tration, there are still others involving any other nation 
you may select, not excluding our own Republic. 

§ § § 

^ Now about this war business, that is to say, your own 
business. Man wars on the animals and the animals war 
on each other: but the crudest wars of all are those in 
which man wars on his own kind. 
We talk of peace yet go on killing. 

The noblest ideologist, walking down the street, dreaming 
of the Brotherhood, indifferently treads on tiny insects 
that chance to crawl over his path; and the swift-flying 
wheels of the automobile on the country road crush at un- 
awares innocent black beetles or diligent ants, slowly trail- 
ing thru the dust. 

II Everywhere, thruout this Earth, hour by hour, on every 
side, innumerable evidences proclaim the unceasing strug- 
gle. 

Fittest is fittest, despite man's high-blown political align- 
ments, professing to represent the upward march of hu- 
manity; among tigers, the tiger with sharpest claws; 
among eagles, the bird with tireless wings; but among 
men we know not what comprises fitness : for of a fact 
fitness has to do with the way an animal hunts its food, 
wins its mate, rears its young. 

Even a dog does not always fight for his bone. There are 
times when he exercises what men call prudence. After 
a dog has starved long enough, his instinct tells him that 
the thing to do is to bury the surplus bone. He then 



WHEN MAN PRAYS loi 

proceeds to do that very thing, guided by a sense of self- 
preservation. 

fl With man, self-protection takes range so wide that it 
includes miserliness, generosity, lying, stealing, truthful- 
ness, hypocrisy, prayers, tears, dodging, fighting in the 
open : concealed as well behind the lover's kiss as behind 
the villain's curses. 

Then, too, the military hero dies bravely in battle at noon, 
gaining imperishable renown as it is called, but the coward 
flinging away his sword and fleeing the field, extends his 
life from noon till six at night. This is only another way 
of saying that no act high or low is foreign to human 
nature. However vile or however glorious your conduct, 
you never cease to be a human being. We are common 
clay tho our ends are wide apart. Whether we pray or 
curse, we do not cease to be at war. 

§ § § 

If What, man at war when he prays? Impossible. . . , 
He is at peace, truly, at peace. 

][ It may well be that he seeks what he calls peace, but 
he is at war ; war as to the state of his soul ; war with 
the overbrooding night ; with the grave that looms before 
him; with disease that has struck him down, disease 
he would exorcise with prayers told off, fast and faster 
still. 

H The exquisite anguish of the Wars of Prayer exceed 
the agonies of the battlefield, with all its crimson gore 
in the long trenches : because agony is of the body, 
anguish of the spirit ; and beyond the telling are the Wars 
of the Spirit, directed against a misspent life; against the 
ingratitude of those who should remember, or uttered to 
save an erring son or daughter; the sentiment that is 
behind the candle placed in the window, night after night, 
that the wandering boy may return; the sentiment that 



102 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

has to do with endeavoring to console ourselves and to 
be meek in the forgetfulness of fathers for sons, sons 
for fathers ; all too late, the long lonesome Wars of the 
Spirit, carried forth in the cloister, in the darkness, under 
the midnight stars, on the beach before the sea that re- 
plies only with a moan; these are the wars that whiten 
the face and kill the body which must, however, still live 
on and suffer to the end; — these frightful Wars of the 
Spirit, tho screened from the gaze of the sun, go on un- 
ceasingly around us, hour by hour ; because of the brutish 
dispositions of men and man's satire on Brotherhood, 
thus far largely a vision and a dream. . . . And he who 
tells you that in the dim corner of the church where 
the women are praying before the shrine and the candles, 
in that lonesome spot with its spectral shadows and its 
ominous silence, he who tells you we repeat that in this 
place is peace, knows not the meaning of the human 
heart. He who prays is engaged in the long lonesome 
War of the Spirit, whose anguish is not reckoned in the 
number killed, missing or wounded — ^but by frightful 
solitudes, alone with his God. 

§ § § 

jf Thus you see the folly of discussing War as an affair, 
exclusively, of cannon balls. Instead War, the thing in 
itself is deeply rooted in our very nature. Without being 
anything in particular. War is everywhere and always ; 
it is not an expression of a definite thing but it sinks 
its roots deep in the subsoil of our common nature. 
^ War, we repeat, has thus no special face or form, sys- 
tem or reckoning. As we have just shown you, some of 
the greatest wars are unknown to historians, unsung by 
poets, unrecorded in brass or stone, but instead are en- 
graved only in the secret recesses of the human heart . . . 
and if you doltishly insist that we cease speaking in rid- 



WHAT SWORD SEEK YE? 103 

dies and that your scientific mind requires objective 
evidences of "what" we refer to, then in God's name do 
so simple a thing as visit our churches, read our daily- 
newspapers, look at our photoplays there in the semi- 
darkness alone with your conscience, or go out among 
your friends and try to number their scars, received in 
this peculiar business known as the Battle of Life . . . 
then, chastened by what you see and hear, no longer make 
a mock of the plain evidence brought to your brain. 

§ § § 

If Do you not admit it, in secret ? Come now, all your 
life have you, yourself, not been seeking the sword that 
Fate has seemingly deprived you of ? Surely there must 
be some special type of human power that you demand, 
some ambition to give or take, or do or dare ; some great 
idea involving a struggle, to be gained only by pushing 
somebody out of your path . . . ? Come, be frank for 
once. Or, do you expect us to believe that your Manna 
fell from Heaven? 

]| "What" you represent is very simply told : fighting, 
loving, praying sum up man's career from sleep to sleep, 
and this regardless of your proud brag that you are more 
than a man in your intercourse with men ; for you, too, 
no doubt have often felt yourself called on to make 
changes, affecting other men's lives, that is to say, to con- 
quer your rival in love or business, or to drop a coin in 
the poor-box, or to endow a hospital — after you have 
enough left for yourself. 

You made war to get your money; you arm yourself 
with a club to keep your property, otherwise, soon you 
vvill have no property to keep ... or if you prefer to 
talk of reforming a drunkard or leading a sinner to sal- 
vation, even there a great Vv'ar is on your hands, brother ; 
else you fail miserably. 



104 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

The struggles to support righteousness go on unceasingly 
and the battles against entrenched wrong call for the zeal 
of martyrs. . . . War, war everywhere, call it by what 
softer name you please. 

§ § § 

If Human life without war — what a strange idea, what 
a form of hypocrisy. Does man really believe it, and if 
so, how does he go about to prove it ? 
However, this is not to say that man does not change 
his style of giving battle. 

While seemingly becoming less coarse in his warfare, he 
is in reality more barbarous; he utilizes the noblest in- 
ventions — wireless, aeroplane — to help murder more sci- 
entifically, by machinery. 

^A hundred exquisite forms of butchery still exist in 
these United States. 

Religious toleration is promised in the Constitution, but 
the preacher cannot stay unless he preaches the type of 
sermon we wish. 

Political equality has been ordained a thousand times, 
but the war still goes on — and must go on ! 
Nations through their presidents, kings or parliaments 
proclaim on paper that they do exist to do good to man- 
kind ; and this in the face of their plain self-interests. 

.§..§§ 

^ Mankind is always visiting the kept-historian and pays 
the nimble silver-piece the more readily in proportion as 
the spook promises riches, love, fame and fortune. 
At the theatre, when at the supreme moment the villain 
makes a confession against himself, the audience gives 
a little gasp of astonishment. "What a great man he 
was, after all, an honest man !" 

Val Jean, hearing that another is falsely accused in his 
stead, goes to Paris to give himself up, although he might 



THE HONEST CAT 105 

have kept away; and at the court scene, women weep 
and men stand aghast at the extraordinary picture — an 
honest man ! 

If What o'clock with the world ? Is the sun as high in 
the heavens as we think, and are we on the march ; or are 
we still asleep in our beds, our minds a bat's cave of 
dreams ? 

§ § § 

^Why should we quarrel with man, for being man? 
These promises that man sets forth, on paper, these al- 
leged peace-treaties, these protestations of undying friend- 
ship, between individuals or nations, should be regarded 
rightly as man's peculiar province in enacting his plain 
role of man ; — that is to say, peculiar type of animal that 
gains prey by strategy, instead of fighting in the open. 
In this, man does not share the tactics of the bulldog. 
This noble dog springs to the attack without calling on 
God to bear witness to the justice of his cause. 
The bulldog never sets forth that his wars are in the 
interest of humanity, but are frankly for the personal 
possession of the coveted bone. 

The cat does not sit, hymn book in hand, singing beside 
the mouse's hole; but with instinctive and undisguised 
cunning she waits, breathless, hour after hour, murder in 
her heart. 

These are forms of honesty that are foreign to man's 
nature; he has not claws like the cat nor jaws like the 
bulldog. For these weapons he substitutes writings in 
the form of hymns, treaties, and creeds that set forth 
with solemn protestation man's superiority to Nature in 
this, that man exists to do what he calls good to the 
world ; and it follows that however grotesque his con- 
duct — as a nation or an individual — he is always able to 
justify his deeds as inspired of the love of God. 



io6 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

j[ We see no reason why things should be otherwise ; it 
is too much to hope that man will ever make open con- 
fession against himself. 

And for that matter, if we are to confide in our Father 
Confessor, note this peculiarity known to priests who 
have churches — out-of-the-way churches — near the depots 
of great cities where men and women come and go always 
in haste, leaving no trace behind. 

These are the priests who hear the frightful heart-secrets 
of young women about to become mothers outside the 
law; thieves, murderers, graveyard ghouls; all manner of 
peculiar human animal types — claws, teeth, jaws, and 
bowels. 

The woman, closely veiled, takes a long railroad journey, 
to find a safe confessional, thus strangely sought out. 
In fifteen minutes, she is again on the train, her mind 
relieved that she had the courage to make a confession 
against herself. 

^ Thus, even in humility, man employs, in extreme cases, 
his cunning to prevent the plain fact becoming known — 
that he is a man and acted like a man ! 
The one thing that he will not do — man or nation — is to 
stand forth in all the stark realism of his estate. 
j[ His prayer should read like this : 

It is a glorious thing to be a man, and to live like a 
man, and to do like a man ; 
I am a man ; 

I seek my self-interest night and day; 
I live by plunder. 

^ These three things are of my estate since time began : 
I hunt my woman ; 
I kill my enemy; 
I worship my God. 
^ Let the world know the glad tidings. 



XVI 

BLOOD WILL TELL 

^ From the beginning, there never was a time 
zvhen there was peace on this Earth, nor is there 
peace here and now. . . . Not the fact of War, 
hut the way in which I make War, that is the 
question! 

^ We do not ask any man to believe what is here recorded 
simply because before his eyes is a pattern in printer's ink 
on a sheet of paper. 

Believe it not, unless it comports with your experience in 
life and squares with your common sense. 
^ This we hold as fundamental : that what a man will do, 
depends on his breed. 

If You have been for three days, without food or drink, 
lost in the Arizona desert. There are now only a few 
gulps of water left in your canteen. Your partner is at 
your side, also your dog. 

Would you (come now, what say you), drink one swal- 
low and hand over the canteen to your partner, that he 
might have his share, or would you gulp it all and let him 
perish ? 

^ There are men who would divide the last drop of water, 
even in a burning desert, death hovering near ; even give 
some to the dying dog. 

However, there also are men who would drink it all, 

107 



io8 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

stab the other man to death to prevent him from getting 
a share, later also killing and eating the dog. 
^ "What" you do, depends on your breed. 

§ § § 

^ Not long ago, a party of gold-seekers, lost in the Alas- 
kan wilderness, found themselves facing starvation. The 
food supply was perilously low; the game had left the 
mountains ; the snows were deep ; the trail was blind. 
The men bound themselves by oath to try to live on quar- 
ter-rations, till a way out was found. 
Ij It was not long, however, before in a most unaccount- 
able way the food began disappearing in small quanti- 
ties. 

^ Who was the guilty wretch ? Suspicion ran through 
camp. Each man glowered at the other, murder in his 
heart ; but there were no accusations : it was not to be 
settled that way. 

A council was held and each starving gold-seeker swore 
a black oath, "I am not the guilty man !" 
][ On the fourth morning, a half -crazed miner, who had 
been dreaming of roast chicken, oysters and champagne, 
while slowly dying of cold and starvation, suddenly 
started in his sleep, and in that instant was as wide awake 
as though it were noon instead of pitch-black night. 
By the dim light of the aurora raw and cold he saw 
something bulky and black, bending over the food-supply. 
At first he thought it was a wolf, but it was a man. 
Before dawn, each morning, one of the party, while his 
companions slept, quietly slipped over to the food supply 
and secretly helped himself to part of the other men's 
share ; then rolling himself in his blanket pretended to 
be asleep. 

With an oath, the miner sprang from his blanket and 
sounded the alarm, catching the thief in the act ! 



THE YELLOW STREAK 109 

j[They decided to kill him, then and there! — stood him 
up against a lonesome pine! — and disregarding his pleas 
for mercy, fired fourteen shots ! 

In his unfair fight with hunger, the thief had showed 
the yellow — and lost. They left his carcass for wolves. 

§ § § 

If This one thing you can set down as the straight of it, 
proven since Time began: Soon or late, men find their 
level, high or low; soon or late, the yellow streak will 
show . . . soon or late, by the wilderness campfire, 
or in the Arizona desert, we get our trial. 
What if it should turn out that you are the man lost in 
the desert, the one who murders his companion in order 
to get for himself the last drop of water in the can- 
teen . . . ? Or, if not you, might I not be that man 
myself . . . ? Who knows what tests you or I may yet 
be called on to withstand, in spite of all our present high 
moral brag? How do I know that I would stand the 
test . . . ? 

Or, what if it should turn out that you, poor miserable 
dying devil, are the one who under cover of night filches 
the crumbs to keep your belly warm, whilst your mates 
are dying of starvation and cold, in the Alaskan wilder- 
ness back of Nome . . . ? Or, if not you, might I not 
be the man, myself . . . ? Who knows ? 
For in the last lone fight with death, the great primal law 
of hunger is supreme ; stronger than laws of man defin- 
ing property rights ; stronger than law of God which 
says, "Thou shah not kill !" 

Tf About all we can hope is this: That as Time passes, 
little by little men will see that since fight we must it 
is better to fight fair: but the full realization of this 
hope is at present largely an iridescent dream. Still, it 
is a hope and a promise for a better day. 



no THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

As long as there are human yellow dogs, so long will 
the yellow streak remain : how long it will take to breed 
it out, or if it can be bred out, no man on this Earth 
to-day is wise enough to know. 

And, in the meantime, this one thing you can set down 
as the straight of it, proven true since Time began : soon 
or late, men find their level, high or low; soon or late, 
the yellow streak will show ; you get your trial, soon or 
late ; — ^and how you will face it remains to be seen. 



XVII 

THE CELESTIAL BIOGRAPH 

Wast thou fain, poor father, 

To hovel thee zvith swine and rogues forlorn 

In short and musty straw f 

^ Says the steward to Kent in King Lear, "What dost 
thou take me for ?" And Kent answers : 
^ "A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, 
proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, 
filthy worsted stocking knave ; a lily-livered, action-taking 
knave ; a glass-gazing superserviceable, finical rogue ; one- 
trunk-inheriting slave — " 

If And that is not all. It is only a part of what Kent 
says. 

If So it will be with the new type of history, as against 
the old : it will all come out of the Great War, and it is 
for you to say, not me, how great the gain will be ; at least 
we will have a chance to improve by study, for we will 
no longer flatter ourselves to death. 
^ It is easily possible for a Nation to vaunt itself proud, 
at the same time secretly hoveling with swine, in the dirty 
straw. 

The great War of 191 4 has brought this gloriously home, 
even to the dullest onlooker. 

^ As one of the beneficent results of the European War, 
may it not come to pass that, scorning the high brags of 

III 



112 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

history-mongers, the world will demand henceforth that 
the thing to do in the history-scribble is to put man in 
the record, not leave him out ; nor yet to adorn his brow 
with a golden circlet, while finding him living in a swine- 
sty. 

j[ We have talked much of this history-thing, as writ, 
but there now comes to mind this ultimate test: 
Before me like a dream rises the episode called the Last 
Day, whereon free from flatteries man is to be judged. 
He is to be judged not as he imagines he is, nor as he 
would like to appear, nor as he has been in the habit of 
parading himself, thru the kindness of his history-mong- 
ers: but as he is, in that way is he to be judged. 
We shall then and then only discern clearly the immense 
gulf between life as secretly lived by men, and as recorded 
by men in their special records called history and biog- 
raphy. . . . 

If And on this Last Day, this one honest day that we 
refer to, high in the clouds the assembled hosts take their 
places in the vast aerial amphitheatre, before their startled 
eyes the gigantic Celestial Screen. 

On this mirror first is flashed man's account of himself 
as set forth in prose, poem and triumphal arch. 
Then the trumpet blows and man's pitiful pretenses in 
his histories fade away, followed by stern reality, as 
against mortal mockeries . . . flashing across the can- 
opy of Heaven, before the speechless multitudes, there 
suddenly shine forth individual living pictures judging 
in turn all mortals here below, likewise all nations ; show- 
ing exactly what you did from the cradle to the grave; 
and what I did; and my neighbor did; and what this 
woman did and what that woman did: so the records 
of the Nations of the earth, as against their historical 
hypocrisies. 



MONSTROUS IDEA 113 

If In fast-flying Celestial scroll, surpassing in marvelous 
detail all records of man's invention here and now one 
by one, man for man, woman for woman, are judged 
in naked moral realism: covering thus the human race, 
depicting on the Celestial Screen this earth-life, in all 
its secret recesses, as contrasted with man's high flat- 
teries in favorite histories and biographies. . . . Each 
of us has his turn and no man's life is spared nor any 
Nation's life. 

§ § § 

If Do you think you could find words strong enough to 
express the bottomless gulf between our conventional 
human records, in books, for humans to read about them- 
selves, and the astonishing revelations of the Celestial 
Biograph, unrolling there in all its naked realism, amidst 
the frozen silence of the earth's hosts, each man in a par- 
oxysm of terror awaiting the moment when his own name 
shall be called, and his individual photo-play flashed in 
gigantic outlines before the eyes of the world-hosts, cov- 
ering every secret act of his life as against his cloak of 
worldly pretense and pious protestation . . . ? 
If 'Tor one, I hope it will never come to pass. No all- 
merciful God could do anything so cruel. ... Is it not 
a monstrous idea ?" I hear a voice. 

What you really mean, brother, in asking me if it is not 
a monstrous idea, is this: Your thought is another of 
the inherent hypocrisies with which man surrounds his 
heart's secrets. 

If Yes, indeed, it is a monstrous idea, brother — that men 
should ever be forced to look on the truth about them- 
selves. 



XVIII 

WHAT THEN IS "HISTORY"? 

The search for evidences of ''manifest destiny, 
in the history of nations, is a favorite pastime of 
history-mongers ; the paradox wherein the hu- 
man masquerades as superhuman. 

^That a spiritual by-product flows from the life of the 
individual to exalt the life of the community; that this 
influence is more than nominal, remaining even after the 
individual, as for example political teacher, has vanished 
from the earthly scene; and that, crystallized into Na- 
tional ideals, this immaterial by-product goes forward 
from generation to generation ; — such is the earnest belief 
of thousands of Americans to-day. 

Not only Americans in America, but Germans in Ger- 
many, Britons in the Isles, Celts in France, and Tartars 
in Russia. 

]f In America, some tell us, we are endeavoring to give 
serious unity to that particular conception of political 
brotherhood known as ''democracy," and hence are intol- 
erant of a line of kings — in the fond hope that we may 
each be our individual king. 

jf Also, that we do indeed move with God's guidance. 
Millions of Americans thus hold to the political dogma 
that the voice of the people is the voice of God. 

114 



MAN'S PROUD BRAGS 115 

If The question is, Can our history be thus truthfully 
represented ? 

To prove or disprove these allegations of manifest des- 
tiny it becomes necessary to leap a wide gulf. 
We must demonstrate that every-day, nominal conduct, 
once crystallized in customs, adhered to by large groups 
of men, becomes by that very form of ancientism some- 
thing superhuman. Are we ready to accept this belief 
after a close scrutiny of our social ideals? 

§ § § . 

If Do not forget that the black drop in our history has 

made wholly as much, historically, as has the red drop. 

If Fighting, loving, praying — eating, drinking, feeling. 

What does it all mean, or does it mean anything we can 

find out, by ''historical" methods? 

Are we prepared to prove, for example, that man's life 

is of exceedingly great importance, as against that of all 

other animals? 

Has man any immunity from accident not shared by a 

dog? 

If Were man's high boast true, would we choose the ends 

that come? 

Would one deliberately cross the street, to be run down 

by a fast-flying automobile? 

Would another elect to put his funds in a bank that the 

cashier wrecks by speculation? 

Would one select ptomain as a dressing for his fish? 

Would another bid his friends good-bye, to take passage 

on an ill-starred Titanic, whose bow crashes into an 

iceberg ? 

If To be born, to struggle, to grow, to suffer, to decay, and 

finally to die — such is the common fate. 

§ § § 

fl Man is always passing ; time is always staying. 



ii6 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

jf What, then, is history ? 

History is the record of human nature, in action ; a never- 
ending series of coronations and crucifixions; yet there 
are men who survey this picture of chaos and tell you 
with great earnestness that it is all "leading to an ap- 
pointed end." 

]fWe have no science of human nature: we know the 
intimate lives of bees, butterflies and wolves; but the 
human heart, though only a foot away, remains largely 
unknown. Must it be forever? 

1[ Man jealously stores up, in books, his progress in the 
arts and sciences, ever building wider temples on the ruins 
of the past. 

But with whole libraries freighted with "human nature," 
as set forth in histories, dramas, sermons, novels, and in 
newspapers, the list does not include a working knowl- 
edge of "human character," except in gross form. 
K The plain truth is that while man is slowly conquering 
the earth, the air and the sea, he knows no more of 
"human nature" than he did in the days of the Mummy. 
Man explores Africa, seeks the Pole, charts the millions 
of stars, and reads the history of the Universe in a grain 
of sand. 

In invention, he is in truth a new Creator — not yet, how- 
ever, realizing the full force of the Scriptural injunc- 
tion, "A new Heaven and new Earth," but in a very real 
sense building his own heaven and earth. 
Through the brain of Science man wrests Nature's se- 
crets from her, one by one, and reconstructs out of the 
debris of the Past a temple of Progress grander than any 
known of olden days. 

K At the same time, the human heart, though only a foot 
away, is practically unexplored, and its true history is 
known only in shadowy glimpses. 



WITH THAT WHITE DAWN ii7 

It Is, in short, not too much to say that men know all 
things, except themselves. 

§ § § 
^ Man certainly knows more of bees and ants than he 

does of his fellow kind. 

Scientists who have thought deeply on ants can tell you 

what an ant will do throughout its entire life; but the 

wisest man cannot say what any human being will do, 

even tomorrow. 

^ In your own case, do you know what test you will be 

called to meet tomorrow, and how you will front it? 

For one man is foolish, another wise; one is prudent, 

another a spendthrift; one is an invalid, another surly 

and bigoted, despised even by his own family ;— and thus 

the types multiply. 

And some men scatter gifts as they go, while other men 

are always looking around to collect toll. 

§ § § 
ITIn some far off time, man may yet come to know his 
own brother-the man at his elbow !-and great will be 
the wisdom thereof, and great the rejoicing m the land. 
Should the white dawn ever break when there is wider 
human understanding between the top and the bottom of 
society, the basis of true progress on this earth is at hand. 
The criminal and the judge, the master and the servant 
the shepherd and the king, the drunkard the thief and 
the elutton, the leper and the athlete, will be found of 
identical mortal dust; each in some special sense brave, 
free and strong—if each could be made to understand. 



XIX 

THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

The stupendous cannonading along European 
trenches finds deadly parallel in shot and shell 
now crashing thru the human mind, the world 
over, riddling our most cherished Mumblings 
expressed in History and Biography, as related 
before the Great War. Therein, what virtues 
did zve not measure, taking us at our own word! 
The dialogue here follozving has for its sole 
purpose the implied suggestion of wider study: 
ground that is not plozved brings forth no har- 
vest. Likezvise, the Great War should not be 
allowed to come and go without warning us that 
History as heretofore zvritten has on the whole 
been a curse and not a help to us, has tricked us 
with extravagant expectations founded often 
enough on fraudulent intent and in flat rejection 
of human nature ; and being told in deliberate 
disregard of plain lessons of experience, quite 
naturally must alzvays end in disappointment. 

If Was all this glory real, that we read about before the 
Great War? This interdenominationalism, international- 
ism, and all the other isms? . . . this hands-across-the- 
sea business? . . . those ideals of brotherhood based on 
politico-religious idealism? . . . that brag about ''surer" 
religious freedom under one flag than under another? 

Ii8 



HOVELING WITH SWINE 119 

. . . this guaranteeing something, we know not what, 
under one Nation rather than under another? 
jf And we freighted shelves with books mountains high, 
wherein we proclaimed our vainglorious ideals of the 
sawdust brotherhood, now alas gone to smash. 
]| War is a merciless revealer of individual as well as 
National shams and quackeries; and if therefore all the 
peculiar moral glories of which we prated in the smug 
Nineteenth Century were not real, then who was respon- 
sible for the telling, and what the motive behind the 
deception? Why should man wish to trick himself as 
to "what" he represents? If, however, the scribblings 
were realities, likewise the mumblings of brotherhood, 
they must still be real, tried by promise against perform- 
ance. . . ? 

^ Or was it all merely some trumped-up thing, some glit- 
tering befoolment composed of politico-religio dingle- 
dangles manufactured to bolster up the conventional lies 
of a conventional world? Alas, Germany, Britain, 
France, Italy, nay not excluding that proud classification 
Greater Britain Overseas, alas, too, America, in spite of 
thy kept-writers and their denials — 

Wast thou fain, poor father. 

To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn 

In short and musty straw? 

§ § § 

If Surprising as it may seem to honest folk, this square- 
headed rapscallion Greusel stands his ground, even after 
"I" pointed out to him the absurdity of his new-fangled 
history-thing: stuck to it that, henceforth in writing about 
Great Personages or Nations the test should be not how 

great they zvere, but hozv lozv they sunk Fi! 

^ Didst ever hear of crank so erased? Everything worth 
while that ever was in the world is still with us, say I! 



120 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

If Greusel's idea seems to he, in general, that if a man 
knows his faults there is a fighting chance that with pa- 
tience and discipline he may correct them, but certainly 
will not improve — if flattered to death. All very promis- 
ing on paper, to he sure, hut we live in a ''practical" 
world and should sustain as far as possible the Settled 
Order, don't you think? 

^ May I cut in by remarking, as known to all honest men, 
that zve have long been endeavoring to standardize our 
Civilisation as it were, to certify to our babies, our pure 
milk, our wives, our daughters, nay by Heavens to our 
optimism and to our very patriotism. Read the Presi- 
dent's Message; and would his Excellency ask blessings 
if we were not a Chosen People and had not kept the 
Commandments f 

§ § § 

If On the other hand, in all decency, should not ''history" 
be bulwarked on men's ways? Why not begin now by 
writing a new type of history by putting man in, instead 
of by keeping him out and imagining what he ought to 
do and say? History is neither more nor less than 
human nature in action, the record of life as it is. 
If Hence, with Nations as with individuals, it is well not 
to make too many promises if we expect to keep 
them. . . . Omit no faults, frailties or obsessions, in- 
clude also a few paragraphs on such feeble virtues as 
man displays at long intervals, in his brief and troubled 
journey across the track of Time. This at least would 
provide a type of history from which we would not need 
back down; the other kind turned out to be poor stuff; 
we closed our eyes to our hoveling with swine and ex- 
alted our virtues to the skies ; coming at least to believe 
we are a Chosen People, and that our very historical 
mock- heroics are ordained of God. ... 



ARE WE A CHOSEN PEOPLE? 121 

If One does not need an Old Testament imagination com- 
posed of frightful wraths and worlds crashing to de- 
struction in hell-fires, to reaHze that our old-time accounts 
of ourselves in our pet histories were mighty failures as 
records of humans. All is now shot to pieces, along with 
the 5,000,000 dead that do fill the trenches. . . . For 
mark you, the Great War has forced us to face in all its 
nakedness the world in which we live, making sudden 
and stupendous end, in flashes of dynamite, to those 
last historical rags of pride wherewith we were wont to 
flaunt ourselves and proclaim our brags and our conceits ; 
now have we naught to cloak our bodies with, from the 
winter's storms. . . . The expulsion of our First Par- 
ents from the Garden has been exemplified anew. 

§ § § . 

^ From this point the mountebank, with brazen effront- 
ery, tries to make us believe that what we call history 
instead of being quite naturally something to support our 
pride, our individual as well as National dignity, should 
on the contrary be something entirely different. I blush 
to tell you how this churl carries on! All I can make 
out of it is that he must have been fed on sour milk, in 
his youth; that he idled away his time wandering from 
place to place zvithout visible means of support, as it 
seems, with a term or two at the rock pile noiv and then 
to break his spirit; that quite naturally he came to the 
place where he now eyes all honest men with suspicion; 
trying with his daiuned innovations to affront and insidt 
us, and to undermine our faith in all the good things his- 
torians have been put to so much pains to tell about us, 
in days gone by. 

^ I quote his vile speech not because I believe a word of 
it, but that you may see how madness tilts the brain, in 
war-times. 



122 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

1[Nay, make no grievous error; what we have heretofore 
Hved by we live by no more ; our smug moralities have 
found us out; the game is ended; the score is chalked 
where all may read; the moving hand has written. . . . 
For we built ourselves a beautiful Garden of Lies, and 
called it our Garden of Eden. And we invented our pig- 
trough history, representing ourselves as an angel with a 
revolver in its hand; and we learned to look on it as 
something good, to go by, and to live by. . . . Men talk 
of "history," as tho it were some profoundly unattainable 
record reserved only for year-long search by students 
pouring thru the archives, but the simple Old Testament 
borrows a tremendous advantage over all the books man 
writes and calls histories; for the Old Testament is the 
only history in which man is called to his face hypocrite, 
liar and thief. . . . And man, reading these plain words, 
marvels at them and not wishing to make a confession 
against himself, replies that such extraordinary utter- 
ances must be inspired, the judgment of a super-man, yea 
of God ; for man in all the mountains of history in which 
he has told his own tale, has never been frank enough 
to look at himself as he is ; still does he need a sacrifice 
to let him, personally, go free. And when suddenly con- 
fronted with himself as he is, in all his moral nakedness, 
as revealed by the Great War, he deplores that he has 
been driven out of his Eden, which is only another way 
of saying from his Garden of Lies. ... At this solemn 
moment, stript of his last rags of historical self-praise, 
with five millions of his brothers lying around him in 
death agonies, this peculiar animal, otherwise known as 
man, is now standing naked before his fellow-kind in 
acknowledged self-distrust of all the old lies by which 
once he was wont to fool himself. It cannot longer be 
concealed that the eye of the eagle sees more than the 



THE FIG LEAF! 123 

eye of the groveling toad. Is he tired of being a toad 
and now longs to be an eagle? . . . 

§ § § 

^/ mish to make perfectly clear that in no wise do I 
endorse these ravings; they seem to be such as one might 
best hear in Blooming dale. . . . Let us be sensible: 
this is a ''practical world; zve have to live in it; we have 
to have something to live by, that is a fact; we must 
believe something, so why not the best, as it were? Are 
our Great Historical Personages to be made a mock of? 
The writer's theory is perfectly anarchistic, to wit, that 
in writing history zve should put man in the story as he 
is. Now I protest this is going too far. No honest 
father cares to place before his growing daughter certain 
facts as to what sort of fellow he is, or zvas; there are 
certain National peculiarities, also, that no conservative 
historian can dzvell on and expect to hold the good will 
of his fellow-citizens. Fill it in to suit yourself. . . . The 
rights of the Settled Order should come first, I protest. 
History should not be a spying-glass or tell-tale such as 
they have in the Philadelphia upper-flats, to peek up and 
dozmt the street; nay, history should instead be a cloak 
to cover our scars and to make us look dignified and 
charming. Why God himself in the Garden made our 
First Parents put on something. ... / trust I do not 
misquote history f My mind is so upset by this damned 
nonsense of a new historical-thing ! Pardon my bold 
language, friends. 

§ § § 

^ In plain words, we have long been writing history in 
such a way that, in effect, it has become a sort of glori- 
fied Rogue's March, wherein man has deliberately pre- 
sented himself as a poseur. 
H This dastardly form of historical quackery is now, 



124 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

thank God, becoming more and more difficult to sustain, 
and is rapidly playing out. The Great War has forced 
us to revise our pretensions and to return to earth. 
^ For the first time in centuries man will now have a 
genuine opportunity to look at himself not as he thinks 
he ought to be, but as he is, as a human animal ; and it 
will be increasingly difficult for him henceforth to enact 
the poseur and the demi-god. The great question is, Is 
he satisfied with the picture he presents . . . ? 

§. § § 

^ Greiisel coins a peculiar phrase to characterize the 
conventional reserve of history. He brazenly calls his- 
tory, as writ, a ''sort of glorified Rogue's March," by 
which he undoubtedly means that we are all more or less 
scoundrels, and were justice done, "Few would escape 
the whipping post." To this I reply: There is a law of 
propriety, as between gentlemen, and in my opinion it is 
all tommyrot to go about inquiring where this or that 
Great Personage got his money, or to number the devious 
political ways in which any Nation {not excluding our 
own America) gained first rank on land or on sea. The 
President assures us in his Messages that we are a Chosen 
People; and besides, I think that honest men are agreed 
that the world is quite well off as it is; and no new- 
fangled ideas of history-writing should offend our Amer- 
ican sensibilities. Let us sustain things as they are! The 
Settled Order, zvith our system of Certified and Standard- 
ised things! Our landed estates, our interest, bond and 
mortgage accounts, our happy homes! Yes, under 
Heaven, I do solemnly proclaim that our very soup kitch- 
ens, our foundlings' homes, our prisons, are in them- 
selves evidences of humane efforts to make things better; 
and I, for one, see no reason why they should be attacked, 
or exposed. . . . We do not expect our sons to be saints, 



"GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY?'^ 125 

of course; hut why speak of it, why dwell on it, why 
rasp on it, why harp on it? Let it he zvidely known that 
the virtues have their place in the lives of eminent Ameri- 
cans; it is elevating to the youth of the land, all this 
report of virtue, even tho some of the National stuffs h^ 
a hit spurious, to he sure. ... In short, in the olden 
days — the good old days! — a rogue got three months for 
soliciting alms without authority ; or for pretending to 
read the palm, or the stars; or for deserting his wife and 
leaving the child on the parish; — and nozv let us add that 
a similar penalty ought to ohtain for the scribhler (/ will 
not term him an historian), who would make a mock of 
the Settled Order. It should he a prison offence for any 
writer to reveal the secret ways in which a Great Per- 
sonage or a Great Nation came forward in worldly zvealth 
or honors. Yes, indeed! Fi, fi, say I to the contrary- 
minded! 

§ § § 

^ Few men hate themselves enough to tell the truth about 
their secret motives ; men fear truth, fleeing as tho from 
the plague, nay become panic-stricken when face to face 
with those supreme moments in which Truth is an- 
nounced as about to open the door. 
Yea, mark the solemn hush in court when the judge 
asks with an air of ominous foreboding : 
If "Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed on your 
verdict?" 

If "We have, your honor." 
jf "And what say you, guilty or not guilty ?" 
ji Thus in all the crises of life, moments of supreme revel- 
ation are moments of frozen silence, as tho the human 
heart stood still at the very thot of justice. 
Fearing to face the plain facts as we know them in 
secret places, man sets up his many imaginations to pre- 



126 THE ROGUE^S MARCH 

sent self-interest in the guise of patriotism, glory, honor, 
or virtue. 

Behold the scoundrel, borrowing robes of righteousness 
to help him in his fight to overcome virtue: observe too 
the Nation, setting out to play the blackguard, proclaim 
always that her intrigues of politics are high and holy 
rites supported by religion and annointed of God. 
If Man is a peculiar animal, and one of the strangest 
things about him is his habit of pretending to look at the 
stars while in reality groveling in the pit. 
He calls black, white; up, down; East, West; cruelty, 
mercy ; ill-will, charity ; prejudice, toleration ; and death, 
Hfe. 

What peculiar something in his mad brain is gratified 
enormously by this final mental obsession wherein man 
refuses even to be honest with himself? 
]f Man, as long as he can eat in secret, knows no shame. 
Therefore, his pride is immensely gratified by inventing 
what he terms the truth of history, wherein by vast 
industry, thru endless scribblings, thru parchments, 
treaties, and even by legends on tombs : in all these ways 
and in all these places, man's conception of honesty with 
himself is to try to present himself as he is not. . . . 
Likewise multitudes plunder in the name of law, all the 
time evoking the majesty of justice; and still other mul- 
titudes use the name religion to gain by trafficking in 
human ignorance ; and there are yet multitudes that while 
publicly upholding abstract principles of brotherhood 
secretly are as buzzards living on dead flesh. 
If the prostitute would no longer make pretense of vir- 
tue ... if the statesman would no longer insist that he 
lives to do good to others ... if the news-monger would 
no longer cry in the market-place that he is the one true 
friend of the people ... if the convict would admit that 



ON THAT GREAT DAY ! 127 

he is guilty ... if the judge would rise in court and 
call to the multitude that he has trafficked in justice . . . 
or if the leader of the new religion would, from his 
pulpit, some morning openly confess that it was all a 
fake and a sham . . . ! 

From that moment of self-revelation, wherein man would 
no longer make mock and ill-omen of his higher self, man 
would no longer need call on God to support his feeble 
virtues, nor dream of some imaginary Kingdom of Right- 
eousness afar, for indeed would the larger Hfe be very 
close at hand. 

*T sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the 
world, and upon all opposition and shame: 
I see in low life the mother misused by her chil- 
dren, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate : 
I see the wife misused by her husband, I see 

the tremendous seducer of young women : 
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unre- 
quited love attempted to be hid, I see these 
sights on the earth. 
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, 

I see martyrs and prisoners : 
I observe the slights and degradations cast by 
arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, 
and upon negroes, and the like : 
All these, all the meanness and agony without 
end, I, sitting, look out upon. . . ." 
^ And now we must bring this Rogue's March book to a 
sudden close. The hour is growing late, the candle is 
dimming fast as it sputters in its socket, with our task 
still before us ! Here, then, we bid you farewell. 
]f It is for your common sense to remind you now, with 
sadness, to what extent we have shown that man has 
made himself the pitiful victim to words instead of faith. 



128 THE ROGUE'S MARCH 

We mumble words in our histories and biographies, 
words in the market-place, words in our prayers; — and 
still the human carnival goes on. 
There is the word patriotism. 

It has been used since Time began — to cover buccanneer- 
ing expeditions whose naked object is murder and 
plunder. 

We have also the high-sounding words love, religion, 
property, business enterprise, statesmanship, humanity. 
And of all these words, it is a question whether the 
truth has ever been told thru the unending procession of 
the centuries : and taking men at their own valuation 
thru their acts, is it indeed to be expected that the day 
will yet come when men clearly understand the real defi- 
nition of these words? 

jf Truth, the Eternal Magdalen, made what she is by the 
brutish impositions of men, has for many long years 
hidden her face in the market-place, awaiting a new race 
of men to set her free. 
^ How much longer must she wait ? 

THE END 



Deacldified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: fip^ 2002 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Townsiiip, PA 16066 
(724) 779-2111 



